


Test Run

by the_rat_wins



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Shameless Big Bang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-15 03:39:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 25,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7205678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rat_wins/pseuds/the_rat_wins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The daughter of the Atraxen system's richest glitterstim merchant has been kidnapped. The Jedi Council’s newest knight has taken it upon himself to rescue her, unaware that a dangerous bounty hunter is already on her trail.</p><p>(Star Wars AU; Ian is a new Jedi struggling to find mental and emotional balance through the Force, and bounty hunter Mickey just wants to finish the job and collect his reward. Until he doesn't.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you SO MUCH to [loftec](http://loftec.tumblr.com) for the incredible [art](http://loftec.tumblr.com/tagged/test-run). A burning urge to see Ian and Mickey as they would be in the Star Wars universe was the whole reason I chose to write this story, and the art is everything I dreamed and more. <3

[ ](http://loftec.tumblr.com/post/145933833065)

 

[ ](http://loftec.tumblr.com/post/145933833065)

 

Ian is kneeling, the gleaming black floor cold even through his robes. He doesn’t look up—not yet. The security droid had been clear: he was to remain with his head down and his knees bent until he was explicitly invited to do otherwise.

Once, he might have thought it was some kind of power play, and no doubt that was a useful side effect. But judging from the brief cold tingle that passes through him, he’s pretty sure that the entire floor is the surface of some huge security scanner, and that he’s being searched down to the molecular level by someone in a high-tech room below.

His lightsaber has already been confiscated, now in the hands of the security droid outside. He can sense it, a comfort even though it’s too far away to be of use. It’s been years since he was in a place that required him to leave it behind, and never without his master at his side.

It’s hard not to feel vulnerable, weaponless, with his head bent and his neck exposed. But, he reminds himself, he’s not truly alone. The Force flows through this room, just as it does anywhere else. Through the scanner, through the throne in front of him, and through him. He relaxes, lets it in, feels it connecting him to everything.

Including the woman on the throne: the commander of half the ships in the quadrant, and more importantly, the controlling interest in the planet’s glitterstim trade. In the last ten years, the mining and sale of the spice has flourished into a full empire, with her at its head. Hence the scanner, the security, the throne.

But when Ian had known her, she’d practically been his older sister. Fiona’s best friend.

Things have changed since then.

He focuses again, lets his thoughts of the past slip away. It’s the present that concerns him now. And the future.

“Rise,” says a cool voice in front of him, and Ian raises his head and stands up, seeing V for the first time since he left. Her long hair is twisted into thousands of braids, all gathered together at the back and then spread out above her head in a wide fan, backed by a silver disc. Her dress is long and black, with trailing sleeves covered in jet-black beads and tiny white jewels that repeat the same stitched pattern over and over again: the molecular structure of the stim. Her mouth is a dark red, almost purple, and her eyes are heavy with silver paint.

But underneath it, he can still see Veronica, and beneath the makeup and the gleam of metal, her eyes are full of pain. But she smiles when she looks at him.

“Ian,” she says, and this time her voice sounds the same as he remembers, too. “You’re . . . taller.”

He ducks his head and then smiles, looking back up at her. “Well, I was ten the last time you saw me. It’s hardly the only thing that’s different.”

“No, it’s not,” she says, and the smile fades, and the pain shines out even stronger than before.

But she doesn’t continue, doesn’t explain. It almost looks like she can’t. She just stares down at him in silence, tears in her eyes.

He is silent for a few moments. Ducks his head again. How long, he wonders, should he wait to see if she can bring herself to talk? Even without looking, he can hear her take a trembling breath, then let it out. No words.

“You asked the Council,” he begins, still looking at the floor, “for me specifically. By name.”

“Yes,” she says. “I don’t trust anyone else to—” Another breath, but she still can’t say it.

“Your daughter,” he says, as gently as he can. She lets out a soft sound, almost a gasp, but he keeps going. “Gemma. She’s . . . missing?” The Council had been unclear on the details, or maybe they hadn’t known them. But V seems to have no doubts.

“Gemma was taken,” she says, and now there is anger. “Someone took her away.”

Ian knows the Council doesn’t believe that. His assigned mission is to prove that Gemma left under her own power. V is prepared to go to war with whichever competitor she decides is guilty of kidnapping her daughter, and the Council fears the strife could prove disruptive on an intergalactic scale.

But his real mission, self-assigned, is to find her. Find her, and make sure she’s safe. He’s more aware of the Council’s blind spots than most Jedi. To them, Gemma is the child of a glorified criminal, missing because she decided to go on a teenage bender.

She might be. Or V might be correct. Either way, he doesn’t trust anyone else to treat the mission with the seriousness it deserves. He, at least, actually cares about her as a human being in danger, not a political pawn. That has to count for something.

“Is there anything you didn’t tell the Council?” he asks V. “Anything you didn’t want to share with them that might be helpful?”

V shakes her head, unable to speak again.

“Just the ship, then?” A modified Corellian pleasure boat, intended for parties and the like, but now stripped down to bare bones, had landed, unauthorized, at the palace the night before Gemma went missing.

V’s face hardens. “That’s right.”

Ian nods. He hadn’t really expected that coming here, talking with her face-to-face, would give him new information. Still, something felt . . . important about being here. Seeing her.

Well, if nothing else, at least she probably felt better for having seen him, spoken to him. Not just a name on a screen. Maybe that was enough.

“I swear, V,” he said. “I’ll find her. I’ll bring her home.”

She nodded down at him. “I know, Ian. I know you will.”

 

Mickey studies the man in front of him, then knocks back the clear shot of . . . whatever the man had bought him. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“So?” the man demands. “You’ll take it?”

Mickey leans back in his chair and considers the guy again. He’s tall, white, with long hair tied back. His face is anxious. His clothes are plain—almost too plain. Especially considering the amount of money he’s offering for this job.

“Depends,” Mickey says. “You gonna stop lying about whatever you’re lying to me about?”

The man looks taken aback for a second, but then his shoulders slump. “I—look, my wife doesn’t know I’m here.”

“Not the first time I’ve heard that one.” Mickey chuckles, but the guy gives him a look.

“You mind? My daughter is fucking missing, here.”

Mickey nods. Fair enough. He leans forward again and stares the guy in the eye.

“Look, you gotta understand this: I can’t do this job on the hope you’ll feel like paying me when it’s done. I also can’t do it without being able to cover the costs I’m going to incur in the process.”

“So, what, you want half in advance? Fine, done, whatever. Whatever it takes to get her back safe.”

Whoa. Mickey had been planning on asking for a couple of thousand. Enough to make it worth it if the whole thing fell through.

“Yeah, that’ll work,” he says instead, covering pretty well.

Who the hell is this guy that he can drop 50,000 credits without even pausing? Jesus, what the hell is he getting himself into here?

On the other hand, who gives a shit? 50,000 is enough to keep him in food and fuel for a year. Done, and done.

“Thing is,” Mickey says, “it’s real unusual that they didn’t send a ransom demand. Makes it a little trickier.” That’s as close as he’s gonna get to suggesting that this guy’s kid might have just up and run off on her own. Truth of the matter is, he doesn’t much care. Mickey gets paid either way. Only difference is whether or not he might have to knock her over the head to bring her back. Of course, with an actual kidnapping, there’s a higher possibility that he ends up coming home with a corpse anyway.

He gets paid then, too. A bounty is a bounty.

“You saying you can’t do it?” the man says, desperate.

“Didn’t say that. Just makes it a little trickier. Want to make sure we’re all on the same page before I get started. _Don’t_ want to be hearing from you every couple of days, asking what I’ve found. Search like this, it can takes some time.”

“All right, no problem.” The man nods. “But . . . you will tell me, right? When you find something?”

“Of course,” Mickey says. He moves his arm, displaying the seal of the house imprinted on his armor, and grins at the man. “Return of missing items is my specialty.”

 

It isn’t exactly the family business. Mickey’s family had been more in the habit of making things disappear. Probably the reason he ended up doing the opposite. And hell, in a way, it’s kind of perfect. Not every bounty hunter can say that his first capture had been his fugitive murderer of a father. The longest night of Mickey’s life had been the trip to Paqualis with his father tied up in the back hold of his ship, spitting blood and bile.

It had been freeing, though. Hearing his father raging like a caged animal, unable to make good on his threats the way he had all through Mickey’s life up until that point. His worst nightmare, defeated.

After that, Mickey was the one with the power, the money, and—after a few captures not related to him by blood—the attention of all the bounty hunter guilds in the system. He had his pick of employers. And he picked Benelex, specializing in the retrieval of hostages and kidnappings, because damn, if you were gonna turn over a new leaf, might as well turn it over all the way.

Though, truth be told, he suspects that his job would be a fuckload more fun if he was chasing lowdown dirty criminals like his family, instead of always looking for innocent kids and shit.

People also tended to be a lot more forgiving about criminal bounties coming in dead than they were about their loved ones not coming home in one piece. But that’s the nature of the business, and Mickey is used to it by now.

Back on his ship, he flips through the listings on the screen in front of him, and marks the job as claimed.

Then he pulls up the picture of his target.

A girl, Gemma. Mid-teens. Dark skin, short hair in a slicked-back wave. In the picture, she’s dressed formally for some event, in a dark blue dress that goes to the floor. There’s a small, one-sided smile on her face, like whoever captured the image is someone she’s amused with. The necklace she’s wearing—opals, big ones—looks like it belongs on royalty. Not some kid. He shakes his head. Knowing that she’s missing, it’s like he’s staring at a target someone drew on her.

The only unusual arrival reported the night before she disappeared was a stripped-down Corellian ship with a slow hyperdrive. It was a shitty getaway ship, since it was recognizable as hell. Some rich person’s party boat, probably sold off when they realized they were in debt they couldn’t shake.

If Mickey had been the one in the pilot’s seat, the first thing he’d have done was head to a chop shop and swap his ship. He didn’t know this quadrant well, but there were always signs of where that kind of establishment would flourish: inhabitable planets with no nice views or valuable mineral rights. Deserts, sometimes, or jungles with animals no one wanted to mess with.

Flipping through the possibilities on his screen, he saw three likely options, two nearby and one, a jungle planet, a little farther out. Whoever took her had an ounce of brains—and kidnappers usually did, or at least thought they did—they would have passed up the first two, and made the trade on the third.

Mickey keyed in the coordinates, and made the jump.

 

Ian has often found that the easiest way to get information is to ask about something else entirely, and let the person he’s questioning offer up what he needs on their own—perhaps with the goal of using it to distract him from the information that they _think_ he’s after.

That trick works particularly well on the kind of person he’s facing now: a criminal business owner with a lot to lose and a natural dislike of him based solely on the word “Jedi.”

“Looking to buy,” he says, and she looks at him more friendly right away. Now it gets harder: he can’t be too obvious about what he wants to know, or it will be obvious why he’s really here. Most importantly, he needs her to try to up-sell him—but he doesn’t think that will be a problem.

“And what is your need?” she asks in Standard first, but he thinks he recognizes her accent.

“Something small, sturdy,” he says in Genvesian. He knows that his accent is excellent, and she smiles hugely in answer, showing square brown teeth.

“The Jedi is familiar with the seven pools?” she asks, her eyes fixed on his face.

“A short journey only,” he says. “Unparalleled beauty.”

She nods, pleased with his polite, correct response. Then she sighs.

“I have not returned since”—here she says something he can’t quite parse, but the wistful look on her face makes it clear enough. Then she smiles again, more predatory this time.

“And what is the Jedi inclined to exchange for one of the ships in question?” she asks. This is where he needs to be careful: he has to offer less than what the Corellian ship would go for, but not so low that she doesn’t think she can feasibly push it off on him.

“8,000 credits are in my hand, and of these, I would part with all but 2,000.” The structure allows them both a sense of his actual offer—and how much he’s willing to stretch.

“Very good,” she murmurs, and tugs a screen mounted on a well-oiled arm closer to them. She flips quickly through, the glowing outlines and specs of a hundred ships flying by faster than his eyes can track.

The first one she chooses is clearly a low ball offer, designed to get a better sense of his tastes. It’s small and old, but sturdily built, maybe even decommissioned military stock from some Outer Rim planet, long ago conquered and folded into the bigger empire.

He lets his head tilt a little, doubtfully. She hums and begins to flip again. The next one is a joke, maybe, an over-decorated toy. The silver spikes at the top look like feathers, and faceted windows take up most of the front. It looks as though it will shake apart at the first trip out of atmo.

He raises his eyebrows, careful not to let any disgust cross his face. Politeness above all else.

The next two would have been more than acceptable if he’d actually been looking for what he told her he was. As it is, he gives the barest of nods, and tries not to feel too bad when she is clearly somewhat taken aback. It’s clear that she doesn’t miss her guess very often, and his choosiness is throwing her for a loop.

A little frown growing on her forehead, she offers up two more excellent options, then lets out a soft huff of annoyance when he shakes his head again.

Number six is the one he came here to find: the Corellian. Gutted on the inside, stripped of paint and decoration on the outside, but with strong, elegant lines. Not military—a personal vehicle, maybe reclaimed by the original creditor and resold at value for parts.

He knows there’s no sense in asking the woman where the ship came from. It’s in her interest to share nothing about her ships’ history: criminal, stolen, or even legitimate.

But if he can get inside, maybe he can discover its history for himself . . . or a clue to where Gemma might be now.

“Is there a possibility,” he says carefully, “that I could look at it first?”

She inclines her head, and then gestures toward the door. “Elymi will take you.” A skinny young man—a son, a nephew?—has been standing just out of sight, around the corner in the other room. At this signal, he steps into the room and nods to Ian.

“This way.” The young man’s eyes widen momentarily at the sight of the lightsaber hilt on Ian’s belt, but he recovers his composure quickly, and leads Ian toward the door.

“It’s an odd ship,” Ian says casually, when they are out of earshot. “Unusual to see a pleasure boat stripped like that.”

“Less than you’d think,” Elymi says. He’s younger and more relaxed than his relative, no accent in his speech. They step outside into the heavy, humid air, thick with the smell of rotting plants. Ian thinks of ice, of howling winter wind, and feels the heat dissipate around him. Elymi wipes his forehead surreptitiously.

The ships are parked side by side and packed in towers, one on top of the other, so they rise in steep canyons on either side.

“Rich big shot commissions a vessel, loses everything, and strips it down and sells it off to try to cover the debt,” Elymi continues. “What’s unusual is, I think it was the owner who flew it here this way.”

“Oh?” Ian says.

Elymi nods. “Usually bone pickers and scavs dig them up, then polish them and try to sell them off.”

“But not this one?” Ian says.

“Nah.” Elymi slows down, looking from side to side for some landmark probably only he could recognize. “Ah.” They turn down one of the narrow canyons. The ships here are smaller, but in better condition than most of the other piles of scrap they’ve passed so far.

“This one, it was a fancy lady sold it off.”

“Really!” Ian doesn’t have to fake his surprise. Not exactly the kidnapping profile he was expecting.

Unless it was Gemma herself. A runaway after all, despite what V said.

Or unless he’s on the wrong track entirely, and the ship’s unauthorized takeoff stemmed from shame, not fear of the law.

Either way, there’s no plausible way for him to ask Elymi for more detail—not without giving away his real reason for being here. And if Elymi knows, his boss will know, and she will almost certainly tell the seller. A professional courtesy, if someone is asking questions about her customer.

Elymi stops in front of the ship and looks it up and down, as proud and pleased as if he’d built it himself. “Yes, she’s a nice piece of work, especially with the flash paint and pretty bells and whistles scraped off.” He runs a hand up the side, then punches the button for the hatch. It opens silently, and they step inside.

“It’s almost new,” Ian says, surprised.

“Must’ve been fresh money,” Elymi says wisely. “Quick rise, quick fall.”

There are bare metal walls on either side of them, bolts and brackets showing where furniture and decorations were probably ripped out in a hurry. But everything is shiny and new. It smells new, even.

They head farther in, and Ian sees the galley and the forward deck are the same: stripped-down, but barely touched.

“How many bunks?” he asks. Seems like something a prospective buyer would want to know.

“Six,” Elymi says. “Three of those are bare-bones furnished. Sheets still stowed and all.”

“You don’t clean all that out?”

Elymi shrugs. “We take in ten or twelve ships a day sometimes,” he says. “Cleanup’s for the buyer.”

“What condition is the hyperdrive in?” Ian asks. The truth is . . . he actually does kind of like this ship, now that he’s looking at it up close. The one-man jumper he has for this mission is cramped and old, borrowed from a hangar of old and confiscated ships owned by the Council.

Plenty of Jedi have their own personal ships, especially once they start traveling on missions away from Coruscant. He could do a lot worse than this one.

“Drive’s as clean as the rest of it,” Elymi says. “Not the fastest, but solid.”

It’s possible that there’s something concerning about Ian’s sudden interest in buying the ship. It speaks of attachment, of overexcitement.

His stomach turns. He closes his eyes and takes a few breaths.

“You all right?” Elymi asks. Ian is still and silent, trying to ignore the feeling of the boy’s eyes on him.

 _This is done with_ , he thinks. _This is over._

No. It’s not. Each new feeling, each urge . . . they have to be examined, slowly, pored over. This is what his master has been telling him. What he told her that he had accepted.

He has. He _has_ accepted this.

But all he wants right now is for someone to tell him: Yes, buy the ship, it is the right thing, a smart thing to do. No, do not buy the ship. It is thoughtless, impulsive. A sign of something darker lying quietly below, waiting for a crack to push through. Just a crack . . .

He breathes.

He breathes.

He breathes and reaches for the Force, his fingertips resting on the metal of the bulkhead beside him.

It flows through him, through the ship. Connects them. Binds them together. His mind begins to calm, balanced in the flow. The way he balances in the midst of a fight, first on the surface of his mind, then deep within it.

He opens his eyes. Sees Elymi staring at him, eyes wide.

“Yes,” he says, though he no longer recalls exactly what the question was. “Yes. I want to buy it.”

 

The chop yard’s security is a joke, and tracking down the Corellian ship only takes Mickey a couple of hours. Once he’s figured out the way they have the place organized—ships for parts, ships for sale, ships for show—it’s only a matter of finding the newest additions. Mickey’s deep in the ship’s computer, trying to restore the wiped logs so he can find out more about his quarry and their plans, when he feels something he shouldn’t.

Movement in the ship.

And then he hears something he shouldn’t.

The engines starting up.

“Fuck,” he says. “No. No _fucking_ way.” The odds of someone buying this one ship off this random trash-heap planet while he’s still _on it_ are nonexistent.

Doesn’t change the fact that that’s what seems to be happening, though.

Silently, bitterly, he says good-bye to his own ship, hidden in the jungle about an hour away. At least he’s got his blaster, his armor, and a few other basics with him. He never leaves that stuff behind, for just this reason.

Well, not this specific reason. But there’s a first time for everything.

Crouched over the computer terminal, frozen, his mind is racing. It’s possible—incredibly fucking unlikely, but possible—that this is a coincidence. That out of all the ships in this junkyard, someone just happened to buy this one. Today. In the hour that he was on it.

Yeah. No. If you buy that story, he’s got a housebroken rathtar he wants to sell you, too.

But the other option doesn’t really work either. If someone knew he was here and wanted to take him out, this was a fucking stupid way to go about it. Much easier to wait for him back at his own ship, take him by surprise, dispose of him somewhere in the jungle.

Which just leaves the third, most likely scenario: The long-haired dumbass who hired him hadn’t taken the contract down after Mickey claimed it, and now he’s up against a competitor who followed the same trail as him and thinks that buying the evidence is the best way to track down the target.

Typical. Definitely Mickey’s luck.

On the other hand, maybe this other bounty hunter’s already found the next location the kid had been taken. Mickey doesn’t exactly object to someone else doing his work for him.

But it’s still a hell of an awkward situation. There’s only so long he’s going to be able to stay hidden on a ship this size, and he doesn’t know if they’re going be flying for three minutes or three days.

He’s got no ship, limited weaponry, and almost no intel. But he does have one advantage: The pilot doesn’t know he’s here.

One chance for Mickey to gain the upper hand here. He isn’t going to fuck it up.

 

 

Ian senses the other man on the ship—his nerves, his anger—when he’s halfway to the bridge. Ian doesn’t look away from the screen in front of him. Just pushes his robe back enough that the hilt of his lightsaber is easy to get to.

He wants to know why this person is here, and if Ian attacks him first, there’s no way the man going to talk. Better to stay still, to wait. To make the other man feel in control of the situation.

The cold, hard weight of a blaster against the back of Ian’s head tries to kick his body into fight-or-flight, but he breathes in and out, closes his eyes, and relaxes.

“You take the contract?” demands the man holding the blaster to his head.

A bounty hunter.

Ian opens his eyes slowly and stares straight ahead at the glass of the forward window, where he can see a partial reflection of the man behind him. He sees black body armor, dull and banged up. He can smell metal and oil from the blaster, clean and well-maintained. The man clearly has priorities.

“No contract,” Ian says after a long moment of silence. “Just doing a favor for an old friend.”

“Oh yeah?” the guy says. There’s something like a sneer in his voice. “Funny coincidence then, us both being here, huh?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Ian says calmly.

“Well, your _favor_ is my job, and I want you off it. And off this ship.”

“Not going to happen,” Ian replies. “I promised my friend.” He smiles a little. “And this ship is my property.”

The bounty hunter snorts. It sounds like his finger relaxes a little on the trigger, but the blaster stays steady. “That so?” he says.

“Legally, yes,” Ian says. “And I imagine House Benelex won’t be pleased if they have to defend themselves against a charge of robbery and murder from the Jedi Council, if you throw me out the airlock and take the ship.”

The house is a guess—they specialize in ransoms and kidnappings—but from the way the bounty hunter tenses up again, Ian knows he’s hit close to home.

“You’re a Jedi,” he says. His voice is . . . blank. Ian’s used to all kinds of reactions: excitement, disgust, fear. But this is unsettling in a different way.

“I am,” he says. “And I don’t want to take your reward, or your glory, or whatever it is you’re after. I just want to find her, and bring her home. Back to her mother.”

The bounty hunter lets out a short laugh. “Her mother, huh? Think I might be getting an idea of what’s going on here.”

“Really?” Ian says. “I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.” He pauses. “Maybe you’d consider pointing that blaster somewhere other than my skull while we talk it over?”

A long moment, and all he can hear is his pulse in his ears. He closes his eyes again, and takes a slow breath.

The cold metal of the blaster eases away from his head, and the bounty hunter takes a step back. Ian feels his muscles relax. In truth, he hadn’t been too concerned—his relaxes were faster than a human who wasn’t trained in the Force would ever believe—but there was still something about having an weapon so close to your brain that was disconcerting.

“Thanks,” he says drily, standing up and turning around to face the man.

He’s not quite the hardened, intimidating criminal type that Ian was expecting. For one thing, he’s young. Ian’s age, maybe a few years older. For another, he’s not large.

But the energy coming off him is that of a much bigger, more powerful person. It almost shoves at Ian, makes him want to take a step back. He can feel it radiating off him, like an unshielded energy core. The man’s eyes flick up and down Ian’s body, taking in everything about him, resting an extra second on the lightsaber hilt on his belt.

“You fucking stranded me here with you,” the bounty hunter informs him, aggressive, challenging. “My ship, it was back on that planet.”

Ian raises his eyebrows. “What do you want me to say?” he asks. “Sorry for not sweeping the ship for stowaways before I took off?”

The bounty hunter glares at him, silent, and Ian meets his eyes. Refuses to back down. The man takes a step closer, tilts his chin up so he can keep their eyes locked.

“You’re gonna turn this thing around,” the bounty hunter says, “and you’re gonna drop me back at my ship.” He takes one more step, until he’s an inch away from Ian’s face. “Got it?”

Ian doesn’t move, doesn’t blink. The man doesn’t feel like someone on the brink of snapping. But there is an edge of desperation to him, a volatility that Ian doesn’t want to test too far.

“I’m not going to let the trail go any colder than it already is,” he says quietly, staring the bounty hunter down. “It’s been two days. Every second, the odds of finding her get lower. I can take you back to your ship when she’s safe. But for now, we’re going to keep moving.”

He strikes out with the Force, and the bounty hunter shouts with surprise as his blaster clatters to the deck, and Ian kicks it across the floor. In the same moment, Ian’s lightsaber flies into his other hand, and he ignites it, knocking the bounty hunter’s legs out from under him with a kick so he goes down hard and sprawls on the deck.

Ian stands over him. The orange, humming blade of his lightsaber is nowhere near the bounty hunter’s face, but the man can’t seem to look away from it.

“So?” Ian says. Power is thrumming through his veins, lighting up every nerve. It feels good.

Too good. He lets his hold on the Force slip away, and breathes.

The bounty hunter manages a nod, his eyes still fixed on the blade of the lightsaber. His face is blank, but there’s something in his eyes. Anger, maybe. Or fear. Ian can’t tell.

Ian sighs and deactivates his lightsaber, but keeps it in his hand.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

The bounty hunter sets his jaw and says nothing. Exactly what Ian had been trying to avoid by letting him have the upper hand in the first place.

So he takes a gamble.

“Of course, I have ways of finding out. Without asking,” Ian says. The truth is, even if he could search through the man’s mind for the answer (unlikely that he’d be able to with a stranger, someone he has no connection with), he wouldn’t. The Council frowns on violating mental sanctity. But plenty of people don’t know that, or aren’t willing to gamble on it. He’s willing to bet his new bounty hunter companion is one.

“Mickey,” the man finally says, still glaring. “House Benelex, but you already knew that.” His mouth twists.

“Ian.” He pauses. “Jedi Knight.”

“Yeah, I got that part.”

Ian reaches down and offers him a hand up. Mickey stares at it for a second, then rolls to his feet on his own. He bends down and picks up his blaster, examining it carefully for damage, then stowing in his holster. Then he hooks his thumbs behind his belt, and gives Ian a flat, unfriendly look.

“Fine. We keep going. Together. So, let’s talk business.”

“Good. What were you doing on the ship?” Ian says. Mickey glowers, but Ian just stares at him steadily in silence until he relents.

“Looking for a lead, some way to figure out where they were planning to go next.”

Ian nods. “I tried to search the log, but it’s been wiped. Thoroughly. By someone who knew what they were doing.”

Mickey bites his lip, thinking.

“Same,” he says. “You must’ve talked to the jokers running that place, if you bought the damn thing.” He pauses. “Why _did_ you buy it?” Ian doesn’t answer. “Fine, forget about it. They tell you anything about who sold it?”

Ian shrugs. “The younger one let slip that it was a woman, on her own.”

“What, that was all you got out of him? Nothing about what she looked like, how she paid?” Mickey frowns.

“I—yes,” Ian says, trying not to let his annoyance bubble up. “That was all.”

Mickey lets out an annoyed breath. “Great. So, you crash my job, take my ship away, and screw up the only solid lead we have.”

Ian feels himself tensing up, ready to lash out again. It was mistake, letting himself do it before. Letting himself go even that little bit. He can see that now. But it’s too late.

“Well,” he says, “if trading or selling this ship was how the woman managed to buy the one she left in, then she couldn’t afford a hyperdrive. We can probably make a good guess at where she went next after this, just based on trajectories. It’s not like this place is a hub.”

Mickey narrows his eyes. “Yeah,” he says at last. “Fine. Let’s take a look.”

 [](http://loftec.tumblr.com/post/145933833065)

 

A Jedi. Shit. Getting tangled up with someone like that is the last thing Mickey wants.

The guy isn’t wrong, though: It’s been days already, and the trail is getting colder all the time. So, if working together is what they have to do, then that’s what they’ll do.

The Jedi is young, and maybe even inexperienced. His open anger—quickly smothered—when Mickey had refused to talk was surprising, and didn’t square with anything Mickey had ever heard about the Jedi before. They supposed to be cold as ice. Wouldn’t drop a bead of sweat while they kicked you off a cliff, if you got in the way of whatever they were after. Scary motherfuckers. And coming from Mickey, that means something.

But however raw he might be as a Jedi, the guy wasn’t wrong about their next step, either, and a couple of minutes perusing the system of planets around them provides a couple of answers. Actually, Mickey’s sure about where they’re heading as soon as he sees it.

Kenis is mostly swampland, but the one city on the planet is almost 100 percent commercial enterprises on the shady side of the law, and subsequently tax free. A place where people wanting to pay cash to fly under the radar for supplies would feel safe. And if Ian is right about the kidnappers’ ship not having a hyperdrive, they’ll need fuel and food to get them to wherever they’re going next.

Ian is flying. Mickey’s fingers itch, seeing the uncertain way the guy works the controls. But he’s not going to make a play. Not right now, anyway. Better to lie low, make the Jedi feel confident in his position, wait until he lowers his guard . . . and then strike.

Mickey rubs his eyes, gritty with lack of sleep, and Ian sends him a sideways look.

“You can go get some rest in one of the bunks,” he says.

Mickey shoots him a glare, but if his eyes are as red as they feel, the effect is probably kind of pathetic.

“Don’t like sleeping when I’m on a trail. Had a good supply of uppers on my ship. Which is back on that godforsaken trash heap. Where you left it.”

Ian sighs. “We could be at this for days or more without a break. You can’t stay awake the whole time.”

Mickey rolls his eyes. “I’ll pick some more up when we land. No going to be a problem.”

They’re silent for a couple of awkward minutes.

“Guess we’ll have to pick up stuff for ourselves while we’re there, too,” Mickey finally offers. “Don’t suppose you’ve got anything unmarked we can pay with.”

Ian shrugs. “People don’t tend to turn Jedi credit away.”

“Yeah?” Mickey says. “Maybe that’s true on the Core. You’re not gonna find a lot of love for your type out here.”

Ian is silent, staring out at the stars ahead of them. Mickey half expects him to defend himself, his Jedi friends. The purity of their organization and their intentions. Keepers of peace and justice, all that shit. But he doesn’t say anything.

The silence makes Mickey itchy. Not having another dose of the uppers is messing with him, maybe.

“The guy who hired me,” he says after another silence. “Long-haired guy. Really anxious.”

Ian turns to look at him. “Did he tell you his name?” He looks . . . invested. Weird.

“Nah,” Mickey says. “And you said you were contacted by—”

Ian shakes his head. “Her mother.”

“Ah,” Mickey says. “Seen this before. Can’t agree on what to do. Waste of resources, hiring both of us.”

“The Jedi don’t accept payment for finding kidnapping victims,” Ian says stiffly.

Mickey snorts. “Probably why more people don’t come to you, then. Can’t trust someone to do a good job if you ain’t even paying them.”

That gets a hard look, then Ian closes his eyes, visibly trying to let it go.

What’s with this guy? That hadn’t even been a jab, but the guy was acting like Mickey had hit some kind of sore spot.

“I . . . knew her,” Ian says at last.

Mickey raises his eyebrows. “Whoa. The kid?”

“No.” Ian swallows. “Her mother. When I was . . . before I entered the Academy.”

“Ah,” Mickey says. He looks him up and down. “No way you ever even met the kid, then, huh?”

“Don’t think so,” Ian says. “They . . . we weren’t allowed to go home.” He shrugs.

“Was it the Jedi the mother hired? Or was it you?” Mickey asks, watching him closely.

“Me,” Ian admits. “I promised . . .”

Mickey leans back in his chair, and stares out at the stars. “Fucking mistake,” he says.

“What do you mean?” Ian says.

Mickey shrugs. “Just that the odds aren’t great for this kind of job. But you knew that, didn’t you? Smart guy like you. Fancy education.”

“Yes,” Ian says. “I know. And so does she.” He rubs his eyes, but maybe not because he’s tired. “If I asked you to go, would you leave?” His voice is calm.

Mickey grins, and puts his feet up. “Nah. When we’re having such a nice chat? Why wouldn’t I stay?”

Ian sighs.

 

It’s night when they land, and the air is still hot. It stinks like the swamp even in the middle of the city where they dock. Mickey was here for a supply run a few years back, and it’s pretty much the way he remembers: full of shadows, and people who don’t want to see or be seen.

The sellers are roughly grouped by wares, in clusters of buildings across a mile in the city center. No signs to show what they’re selling, or no obvious ones, but Mickey knows how to figure out where to find what they need. He takes a flex sheet of Gemma’s face with him. Worth a try.

Mickey’s bankrolling this leg of their endeavor, since he’s the only one with unmarked credits, but Ian is the one who talks. For all that he’s basically been an open book to Mickey so far—so much for Jedi inscrutability—as soon as he starts talking to one of the fuel sellers, he’s a different person. Quiet, and totally forgettable. With the hilt of his lightsaber hidden in the folds of his brown robes, he just looks like a young, overly fresh-faced monk from some nameless order.

Mickey follows, but doesn’t walk with him. A pair might be memorable where an individual wouldn’t be, and he’s no longer sure that there aren’t other hunters on the trail. If Gemma’s parents couldn’t even agree on who to hire, what’s to say they didn’t hire more bounty hunters, figuring to better the odds?

Or maybe the kidnapper has more security following behind, making sure their trail is clean. Can’t be too safe.

Mickey knows questions are the last thing anyone wants in a place like this, but in the interests of staying on the good side of the guild, most people are willing to answer someone who can flash the House Benelex seal.

Two fuel sellers and five ration store owners haven’t seen Gemma. Of course, there’s no reason to assume a kidnapper would take her on shopping trips, except that leaving prisoners awake and alone results in escape more often than most people would think. So, it’s not impossible.

Still, Mickey keeps his hopes low. Which is why it’s such a fucking shock when the second weapons seller he flashes the flex sheet at gives a short nod, and mutters, “An hour ago. Maybe less. Bought a stunner and a set of knives.” Its eyes, both sets, dart up and down, keeping a lookout for anyone who might report its snitching.

Mickey’s stomach flips. “You just telling me what you think I want to hear, or what?” he says harshly, fingering the grip of his blaster.

“No, no,” it whispers. “An hour. Nice clothes, too nice. Cash, all cash. Looked scared.”

Holy shit. Maybe she’d given her captor the slip after all. Mickey wouldn’t blame her for looking for a weapon either; if he’d escaped something like that, he’d do the same thing.

But the timing is weird. The ship had to have passed through two, almost three days ago, ahead of him and Ian. Why would she be here now, today?

He passes off a token of his appreciation, and goes outside to find Ian waiting, curiously examining a stack of one-use holoslips with alien pornography.

“Yo,” Mickey mutters, leaning against the shelf. “What are you—never mind, forget about it. Gemma. She’s _here_ , the thing in there said. Came by an hour or less ago.”

“How is that possible?” Ian says, startled. “It’s been days.”

“No fucking clue,” Mickey says. “Who cares? She’s here. She got away on her own.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” Ian mutters. “Something’s wrong.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?” Mickey says. He doesn’t wait for an answer. “No fuel, no food, but she gets a weapon. What next?”

“A ride,” Ian says. “A ride home.”

 

It’s a ten-minute walk to the hive of offices where the ticket sellers that provide berth on freight ships off-planet are located. They’re moving fast, and Mickey is practically vibrating with excitement. But Ian can’t shake it. It’s too easy. Too strange. Something is wrong. Someone made this happen, and not, he thinks, someone who’s interested in Gemma finding her way home.

As they move through the quiet streets, Ian studies every bent head, every dark scuttling shape in the shadows, searching for a human girl who looks out of her depth. Nothing. Everyone he sees seems in their element, customers and sellers.

The first few ticket windows are barred shut, and Ian’s feeling of dread increases. The third is open, and the person behind in the counter is slumped forward in some kind of induced daze, but manages to shake awake after Mickey bangs his fist on the metal counter a few times.

“Seen her?” he demands, flashing the flex sheet. The man blinks at it slowly, then shakes his head. Mickey slams his fist down again in frustration, and the man starts to grope around under the counter. probably for some kind of weapon. Ian grabs Mickey’s arm and pulls him away, but Mickey shakes him off, swearing.

“So _close_ ,” he spits. “Can’t let that fucking slug put us off the scent.”

“Calm down,” Ian says. “It’s not that big of a city. All we have to do it watch the ports, track the ships that leave, and follow from there.”

“She was here,” Mickey says. His eyes are wide, and Ian is starting to catch on.

“Found some uppers, huh?”

Mickey wheels on him. “Don’t give me that,” he says. “I’m doing my job. No one said I was going to have to babysit some kind of scum-sucking monk on top of it.”

Ian smiles. “Must have been some good shit, huh?”

Mickey cracks his neck. “It’s not bad. Can we go?”

Ian shrugs. “You realize we’re gonna have to wait around for the fuel and rations to get delivered to the ship, anyway, right? Probably should have halved that dose.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my business,” Mickey mutters, but he falls in behind Ian as they head back to the ship.

“What are the odds?” Mickey keeps muttering under his breath, but Ian can still hear him.

“I’m telling you,” Ian says, “it’s too good to be true. We have to be careful.”

“Or maybe it’s just that we’re that good!” Mickey says, suddenly jovial. Are the mood swings a side effect of the uppers too? “Ever think of that?”

“If it’s her,” Ian says, “then I think she gets the credit, not us.”

“Well, whatever,” Mickey says. “Long as I get paid. Only kind of credit I care about.”

“As long as she gets home,” Ian corrects.

Mickey shrugs. “Whatever,” he repeats.

A couple of urchins are loitering around the ship when they get there. Mickey aims a kick at one of them, and they scatter, hissing.

Ian’s heart pounds, looking at them. One of them has dirty, curly red hair. He thinks of Debbie, so little when he left, barely talking. But still with those curls. He shakes his head, clearing it. Not now. Not today. He needs to focus.

The second they step back onto the ship, he knows that someone else has been there. Recently. The air is disturbed, somehow. He can feel it.

He reaches out and stops Mickey with a touch to the shoulder. Mickey stops, but stares at him. “What—” he starts.

Ian waves him into silence, shakes his head. Mickey goes still—finally. All his buzzing energy is boiled down to an even more alarming stillness. His eyes are wider than ever, and he draw his blaster.

Ian grips his lightsaber hilt, feels its weight in his hand, cool and comforting.

They start to make their way down the entrance bay to the bridge, side by side.

Ian stops by each doorway, checks quickly and quietly inside. None of the sparse furnishings are out of place. But still, there’s that sense of passage. Another presence in the ship. Not strong enough that he can pinpoint where it is, or who. But someone. Or something.

They work their way from the front to the engines. Nothing. No one. Mickey shoots Ian a doubtful look, and Ian can hardly blame him. There’s nothing.

Nothing.

That’s it. Ian holds his hand up, gesturing Mickey into stillness again. He stands in the middle of the empty, quiet hallway. The life support systems are humming softly in the background of his awareness, along with the guidance systems, the computers, the water. He breathes in. Feels Mickey’s bright energy next to him, stoked to a burning fever pitch by the dose he’d taken. Feels the smooth, plain, clean metal of the ship all around him on every side. Lets his mind slip from room to room, wall to wall, every molecule connected, touching, buzzing together.

Except there.

A hole. A blank space, in bunk closest to the bridge: some kind of mental shield, or projection. It’s strong, and well done enough that he missed it . . . for how long? But the edges are so defined, he can almost see it like a silhouette against the warm buzzing life of everything else around it.

He gestures to Mickey to follow him. Mickey makes a face and falls in behind him.

In the hall, just outside the open door of the bunk, Ian stops.

“I know you’re there,” he says, as calmly as he can. “Will you come out?”

The blank spot in his awareness doesn’t move or shift.

 He sighs, and puts out his hand in front of him. “I don’t want to hurt you. And he doesn’t either.”

Mickey lets out a soft snort, but doesn’t interrupt.

“Please?” Ian says.

A small shift, like it’s thinking about it.

Then, just as he expected, a sudden rush, as it makes a break for the door. He pushes out with the Force, and pins it—her—to the wall, gently immobilized, and now entirely visible. She has the stunner in one hand, and one of the knives in the other, with two more tucked into her belt. Her hair is a tangled mess, and her clothes, though high-quality, are messy and wrinkled. She has eyeglasses on, a strange affectation, and not something he saw in her picture.

“Gemma,” he says gently. “You don’t have to run. Your mother sent me. I’m from the Jedi Council, and I just want to help you get home.”

“I’m. Not. Her,” she spits at him, struggling against his invisible grip. “Let me go!”

“The fuck you say?” Mickey demands. But Ian is a step ahead of him. V hadn’t mentioned, but he remembers. She’d been pregnant when he left, pregnant with twins. Gemma and—

“Amy,” he says.

Her eyes fly up to meet his. “Ian? Is that you?”

He nods. “Your mother, she wants me to find Gemma. That’s all. If I let you go, do you promise not to run again?” Slowly, she nods, and he lets her go. She holds the stunner tightly in front of her, and gestures at Mickey with the knife. “Keep him away, I don’t want him near me.”

“Me?” Mickey says, sounding offended. “The fuck did I do?”

“Amy,” Ian says, “please. We just want to help. How . . . when did you sneak onboard?”

“I followed you,” she says. “After you talked to V. I have an unregistered jumper. Gemma and I, we built it together, so we could get out when we wanted.” Ian’s mind is racing, putting things together as fast as he can, but he can’t—it’s too much to follow. He cuts to the chase.

“Do you know who took her?” he asks. “Do you know where she is?”

She shakes her head, and it’s more than a denial. He can see tears gathering in her eyes, and the hand holding the stunner is starting to shake. “It’s not that simple,” she says.

“What are you talking about?” he says urgently. “What’s not simple?”

“She . . . she . . .” Amy says, then swallows. “She ran,” she whispers. “And she didn’t want . . . she didn’t want me following her.”

“Damn it,” Mickey mutters. “Fucking asked him that. What is it? Didn’t want to marry someone? Didn’t like her curfew?”

Amy is silent, her head bowed. Ian sees her choking back a sob, her shoulders shaking. The stunner and knife are both limp in her hands. “I couldn’t stop her,” she whispers. “I tried. So hard. I thought—”

Ian takes a slow step toward her. “Amy,” he says. “Stop her from doing what.”

But he knows. Somehow he already knows.

 

The three of them sit on the bridge, Ian in the pilot’s seat, Amy facing him, sideways in the copilot’s seat, and Mickey leaning awkwardly against the bulkhead. Ian had thrown him a look as they walked up here, like he was hoping Mickey would politely excuse himself. Yeah, not happening. Whatever the fuck was going on here, Mickey needed to know as much as he could, since it clearly depended on some weird personal shit that the two of them knew and he didn’t. For a start . . .

“Why the fuck didn’t you mention she has a twin sister?” he says to Ian.

Ian shakes his head a little bit— _not now_ —and Mickey opens his mouth to protest again, but Ian cuts him off before he can start.

“Amy,” he says. “Why do your parents think she was kidnapped?” Clever, the way he puts it so he’s on her side, not her parents’.

Amy swallows and stares at the floor.

“I’m here to help you,” Ian reminds her. “You know that, right?”

Amy still doesn’t look up.

“You went away,” she says, and the tears are back. She dashes them away fast, like she doesn’t have time for them. But she still doesn’t look up. “No one talked about it. Not out loud. No one had to. It was always just . . . there.”

“I’m sorry,” Ian says. His face is smooth, no emotion on it that Mickey can see. “I didn’t want to go.”

Amy lets out a shaky breath. “V, she said that Fiona was different. After. Lip took care of the kids. And he helped her find the organization, the mines. The man in charge, he didn’t know anything about anything. Lip helped send him away, so V could take over . . .”

“All right,” Ian says. “But what does any of this have to do with Gemma running away?”

This time, when she looks up at Ian, there’s something that looks a lot like anger on her face.

“You weren’t the only one, you know,” she says. “The strongest one, maybe. But not the only one. Lip, had it, a little. And—Gemma.”

Something flickers across Ian’s face, too fast to track. “Gemma left to look for someone to train her,” he says, and it’s not a question.

Amy draws back and stares at him, blank. After a second, her face hardens again. “No one knows her better than I do. I’ve looked for her, and I can’t find her. She’s gone.”

“Well, we’ve got stuff you don’t,” Mickey says. “You know, like, training. Experience. Resources.”

She looks at him, and it seems like she almost hadn’t noticed he was there before. Which, the hell. He prides himself on his intimidating presence. But fine. Apparently the laser sword–wielding monk outranks him.

Any looks from one of them to the other doubtfully.

Ian clasps his hands together around one knee and leans back, projecting calm and confidence. But Mickey can feel something else bubbling below the surface: tension. Maybe even fear. He sneaks a glance at Ian’s face, but it’s smooth, unworried.

“That’s why your parents hired us,” Ian says. “You don’t have to this alone.”

Amy bites her lip, looks down.

“She’s not your responsibility, you know,” Mickey offers . . . and sees her face harden.

“Yeah,” she says. “If only that were true.” Somehow, with that, he lost her.

Ian shifts a tiny bit, and Mickey senses his annoyance.

“Is that all? Can I go?” Amy asks flatly, and Ian sighs.

“We’ll have to take you back to V,” he says.

“We can’t do that!” Mickey cuts in, a little more strongly than he actually feels. He thinks he knows what Ian is getting at now, and he’s good to play along.

“Go back?” Amy demands. “Are you crazy? She already has days and days on us. We don’t have time to go _back_.”

Ian stares at her, expressionless, and after a minute, her face starts to fall.

Mickey raises his eyebrows, just a little. Not a bad trick.

“She’ll run if she sees you, you know,” Amy says.

“Then it’s a good thing we’re going to have you with us, isn’t it?” Mickey says.

 

Mickey likes to work alone. The last time he didn’t, it was with his dad and his brothers. And Mandy, sometimes, wherever she is now.

For most of that time, he’d been a lackey, and his dad hadn’t been much of one for suggestions from lower down the ladder.

Still, Mickey had grabbed at the opportunities that came his way, moments of taking the initiative, times when he could show his dad that he knew what he was doing. Because he did. Probably from hanging around, watching everything his dad did for the first fifteen years of his life, Mickey had good instincts right off the bat for who was trustworthy, who was going to take their money and run, and how to get someone to do what they wanted.

All of which had served him well when he turned on his dad and struck out on his own.

“On his own” has been working out pretty damn well for him ever since. He knows his own loyalties (himself), and he doesn’t have to worry about anyone else’s.

Ian’s loyalties are clear to him: the Jedi, and this woman V, and her kids. Probably in that order. Mickey is relevant to him only as far as he’s interested in bringing Gemma home safe.

Mickey reminds himself of this in the hopes of not getting too caught up in the rush of having someone to play off again, a good cop to his bad cop. He’s not sure it’s working.

Amy is asleep in the closest of the bunks, toward the bridge. A part of Mickey is worried about her running. But she’d have to walk right past them to open the hatch, and he’s pretty sure one of them would notice.

His pills are wearing off again, and he stares blankly out at the glass of the window in front of him.

“Think she’s right?” he asks Ian, to break the silence he feels weighing down on them.

Ian stirs a little, blinking, and Mickey realizes that he’d been in some weird Jedi meditative state. He doesn’t say anything, still staring distractedly.

“About Gemma thinking she can find someone to train her,” Mickey adds,

“Probably,” Ian says.

“Wait. You think Gemma thinks that, or you think Gemma thinks that and she’s right?”

Ian smiles a little. “Yes to the first, not sure about the second. The Council doesn’t like to advertise it, but yes, there are . . . unaffiliated Force users. They lie low, mostly. But every so often . . .” He falls silent.

“What?” Mickey prompts.

Ian sighs. “It doesn’t usually end well,” he says. “They train us for a reason.”

“Why didn’t you train her, then?” Mickey fires back. Part of the job includes getting into his target’s mindset, and now that Gemma’s switched from prey to predator in the case of her own kidnapping, his mind is trying to map its way onto hers, figure out what she thinks, how she feels.

He expects Ian to have a pat answer ready, so the flash of discomfort across his face takes Mickey by surprise.

“It could be she was too old when they found her,” he says.

“Or?” Mickey says.

“Or . . . some other reason,” Ian says.

Mickey makes a face.

“Fine,” he says. “You don’t know why they didn’t take her. You at least know where she might be going, though, right? Where some of these . . . untrained ones are?”

“Not them,” Ian says grimly. “They make it a point to not draw our attention. But I know where she might want to go before that.”

Mickey looks at him doubtfully. “Yeah? Where’s that?”

Ian sighs, and pulls his lightsaber hilt off his belt, holding it out in front of him. Mickey stares at it, and then glances up at Ian’s face.

“Do you know how these work?” Ian says.

Mickey shrugs. “Energy beam.”

Ian smiles, but only for a second. “Sure. But do you know how it’s controlled?”

Mickey laughs. “Guess you’re gonna tell me.”

Ian keeps going like he hadn’t spoken. “One of the trials, one of the tests to become a Jedi. You go to this planet, you find the crystal for the core of your lightsaber. And you build it. It shows . . . who you are, who you want to be. The way you intend to live your life.”

“You think that’s where she went? To get this crystal or whatever?”

Ian stares straight ahead again. “She and her mentor, whoever she finds, and the people like them. They crave . . . legitimacy. They want to prove they’re as strong, as important as the Jedi.”

The cold sweat is gathering on Mickey’s face now, and he wipes it away with a hand that’s shaking more than he wants to admit. He either needs another hit or sleep and water, and while he’d prefer the hit, he knows the sleep will serve him better.

“Are they?” he asks bluntly, and Ian’s eyes widen as he turns to look at him.

“I don’t know,” he finally replies. “My master, she would have said no. I’m not so sure anymore.”

Mickey rolls his eyes. Great. The guy’s going through some kind of crisis of faith in the middle of the job. Perfect.

“You sure about this planet, though? The crystals or whatever?” he says impatiently.

Ian gives him a smile, and Mickey hates that something twists in him to see it. “My master would have said that we should never be sure about anything, I guess.” He looks closer at Mickey’s face. “Except I’m pretty sure you’re going to fall over in a few more minutes. Might be a better idea to do it in your bunk.”

“You’re not wrong,” Mickey mutters, and stands up, his knees like jelly.

“We’ll be on Dantooine in five or six hours,” Ian says.

“I’ll make a note in my travel itinerary,” Mickey says. “Wake me up before you two go off and do anything stupid.”

 

There’s usually no dreams when you sleep after downing the stuff Mickey takes, not real ones. But sometimes, it just means they all hit at once. Mickey wanders, can’t wake enough to escape. He sees Mandy, over and over again. His brothers, mouths open and bloody. Again and again, for hours.

He escaped from that world a long time ago. He did it on his own, without anyone’s help. That much is real.

But in his mind, he’s five years old, eight years old, twelve years old, and the screaming never stops.

 

Ian spent most of his life sleeping in a building with twenty other apprentices, male, female, everything and nothing in between. They learned early on how to ignore the sleeping thoughts of those around them, despite their increasing mental sensitivity. It was easier and less embarrassing for everyone.

But Mickey dreams loud.

Once the course for Dantooine is laid in and they make the jump into hyperspace, there’s nothing to occupy Ian’s attention—going over their scant file on Gemma feels useless—and the bloody horror flick Mickey’s mind is crafting becomes impossible to ignore.

Ian has seen death, in battles, from illness. This is torture for the fun of it.  This is evil.

And beneath it all, he can feel Mickey’s fear, his nausea and disgust. His hatred, of himself mostly.  
Ian tells himself at first that he does it because he needs Mickey at full fighting strength for the mission ahead of them. But his master taught him the dangers of lying to himself, and the truth is, he can’t stand seeing another creature in the pain that Mickey is experiencing without at least trying to do something about it.

The nearest thing he can think of is the smooth, bright, indifferent blur of the stars in hyperspace. He holds that in his mind, the quiet, awed feeling when he traveled in space for the first time, saw the lights all around him, and knew that everything they did, every fear and pain and joy he’d ever experienced, was only a blip, an insignificant flash in the middle of an endless universe.

It could have filled him with despair, but instead, he’d felt comforted. A deep sense of peace, knowing that no matter what happened, it didn’t really make a difference to the universe, in the end.

It’s the deepest sense of peace he has, and he gives it to Mickey. Softly, quietly. A suggestion, not an order.

But Mickey’s mind grabs for it like it’s his last hope to save himself from drowning. Ian gasps, the sound loud in the silence of the bridge, and pulls himself away from the contact as quickly as he can, leaving behind the memory for Mickey to use how he wants. Or not. Other than making sure that Mickey is sleeping enough to keep him alert and aware while they’re finding Gemma, it’s not Ian’s business what he does, or thinks, or feels.

But he can almost picture it. Mickey’s face, frowning in his sleep, slowly relaxing into something softer . . . Ian steps on that thought and grinds it underfoot. Not his business. Not his problem.

He considers checking on Amy, who at least is sleeping quieter than Mickey, if she’s sleeping at all, but the encounter has shaken him, so he leaves her alone. The state his mind is in right now, he would probably accidentally give her a screaming nightmare, instead. He sighs and stretches. There’s no need to sleep right now, but maybe meditating will bring some of the balance that he’s lost today.

If nothing else, at least it will keep his mind safely empty for the rest of the jump. His master probably would have had something to say about the wisdom of using meditation as an avoidance technique.

But his master isn’t here.

 

 [](http://loftec.tumblr.com/post/146155912440/vague-hand-gesture-these-arent-the-droids)

 

Mickey jerks awake, the lowered hum of the ship alerting him to the fact that they’ve dropped out of hyperspace. His mouth is dry, and his face is weirdly damp and cool, like he’d sweated out a fever in his sleep. He rolls out of the bunk, and staggers over to the corner of the room where he’d piled his body armor before collapsing into sleep. Fumbling, he manages to put each piece on over his (probably reeking, after days without a change) dark shirt and pants.

There’s a small sink and faucet in the other corner, and he rinses out his mouth, then swallows down gulp after gulp of water. Shit, those uppers had really taken it out of him. And for what? The Jedi and the kid’s sister have done most of the hard lifting so far. Why is he even—

Mickey shakes his head, jerking himself out of the spiral. Money. It’s his job. He’s been paid, and he’ll be paid more when he’s seen it through.

There’s no mirror above the sink—stripped with the rest of the decorations when the ship was sold, probably. He runs a hand over his face. Probably for the best. And who gives a shit how wrecked he looks, anyway.

He straps his blaster on and heads to the bridge.

Amy is already there, looking out at the green planet ahead of them. Ian is flipping through maps on the screen in front of him, looking for the right place to land.

“I’ve only been there once, years ago,” he says. “They don’t exactly like people to know about the caves—over the years, they’ve been more trouble than they’re worth.”

“How did she know about them?” Amy asks, and Ian’s face flickers with some weird emotion.

“Not everyone who becomes a Jedi stays a Jedi,” he says after a second.

Amy sucks in a breath. “You think—” she starts, but doesn’t finish the thought.

“I don’t know,” says Ian. “We won’t know anything until we find her. Finding her is the most important thing right now.”

Amy nods, but she looks shaken.

“You know where to put us down?” Mickey says abruptly, and both Ian and Amy look up at him, startled. Seriously? It wasn’t like he’d been trying to be quiet.

“Hey,” Ian says, and his voice is . . . off somehow. Formal? “How are you feeling.”

“Like a million credits, thanks for asking,” Mickey says, frowning. “You got the coordinates, or what?”

“No,” Ian says. “But—” His eyes go unfocused for a second, and then they clear, and he points down at the map he’s pulled up, tapping his finger against the screen. “I remember.”

 

They land at dusk, the sun already below the horizon, and night beginning to settle in fast. The lack of visibility on their surroundings makes Mickey twitchy, but the cover is nice.

Dantooine is barely populated, and the spot Ian found for them to hide the ship is on the edge of a forest that ends in a stretch of empty grasslands. On one hand, it makes things harder: there’s no one to ask to find out if they’re on the right track, if Gemma is nearby. But on the other hand, there’s no port authority to bribe or bargain with, no awkward questions about their business.

Which is just as well, since they’re a pretty odd group: a weirdo monk in brown robes, a black-armored bounty hunter, and a teenage girl with braids and glasses, all of them armed (some more visibly than others).

Ian leads them through the tall grass and the thinning trees, confident in spite of the darkness. There’s two cold white moons rising in the sky, but they barely throw any light. The stars are almost brighter, and for a second, Mickey gets lost in the sight of them, and he doesn’t know why. It’s not like he hasn’t seen it before. He shakes himself out of his momentary daze, and focuses on the shadowy shapes of Amy and Ian in front of him.

“It’s not far,” Ian calls softly back to them. Mickey, distracted, almost trips over a rock, but his foot goes through it with an ominous _crunch_. He swears and looks down, seeing bone fragments that reflect the pale moonlight under his boot. Not human. Something canine-looking, with long teeth.

“Something you forgot to mention about the local wildlife?” he asks.

“Kath hounds. They used to guard this place, but they’re all dead now,” Ian replies. “First there was the Jedi, then the Sith. Now no one stays. Just long enough to get what they need.” He pauses. “There are things in the caves, sometimes. Kinrath. They’re big and fast. Poisonous. But I should be able to take care of them. If you see or hear anything moving, shout.”

“Oh, _now_ you tell us this?” Mickey says.

“Why, would you have stayed behind if I’d told you about them before?” Ian replies, walking ahead a little faster.

“Maybe,” Mickey mutters. “Maybe I’m just tired of being told everything when you feel like it, instead of when I need to know it.”

Ian doesn’t acknowledge this. Amy shoots a look back at him, and he glares at her in response. “What?”

“Nothing,” she says, and focuses her attention ahead again.

The entrance to the caves looks like a waist-high pile of stones at first. Mickey doesn’t understand why they’re stopping. Then Ian stretches out a hand, and the rocks slowly lift up, one by one, floating through the air and coming to rest a few feet away.

Mickey can feel his eyes trying to bug out of his head, and looks over to see Amy staring at Ian with distrust on her face. Ian ignores both of them, setting his jaw and letting out a slow breath, then looking at the stone tunnel and stairs stretching down into the ground. He ignites his lightsaber, and the sound cuts through the soft buzz of insects and the wind in the trees. Its orange glow is the brightest thing around, and from below, it makes Ian’s face look full of shadows.

Ian turns and looks back at them, but doesn’t say anything. Then he starts down the stairs, and they follow.


	2. Chapter 2

[ ](http://loftec.tumblr.com/post/146227288585/the-cold-hard-weight-of-a-blaster-against-the)

 

[ ](http://loftec.tumblr.com/post/146227288585/the-cold-hard-weight-of-a-blaster-against-the)

Mickey’s eyes adjust to the tunnels quicker than he feared. Ian’s lightsaber throws a hot glow all around them, and the crystals in the walls and floor throw it back at them, dazzling.

“These worth anything?” Mickey says, trying to keep the awe out of his voice. Ian laughs quietly.

“Only to people who need to build a lightsaber,” he says. “And each of us chooses our own. No one else’s would work as well. You can’t just swap them.”

Mickey rolls his eyes, even though Ian can’t see him. “Yeah? Sounds like a pretty worthless weapon. What do you do if you lose it?”

“Fight without it,” Ian says. “And then make another. What would you do if someone cut off your arm?”

“That a threat?” Mickey says.

Amy, who’s been tense and silent since they got off the ship, lets out a soft snort at this, and Mickey hates that he’s kind of proud of getting her to crack.

But as they get deeper into the tunnels, the weight of the rock above and around them starts to press in, stifling them, and they stop talking. Even their breathing and the low hum of Ian’s lightsaber seems too loud, somehow.

“Gee,” Mickey mutters when he can’t take it anymore. “Wouldn’t this be a shitty time to find out you aren’t big on tight spaces.”

Neither Ian or Amy respond this time.

Mickey doesn’t have that problem, as it happens. Too many runs spent crammed in jump seats or cargo space on ships meant for three fewer people than his dad wanted to have at his back. Mickey wonders sometimes if that’s why he ended up so short compared to his brothers—his body caught on to the fact there wasn’t any room left for him and stopped growing.

It’s serving him pretty well right now, though. Ian and Amy are both in constant danger of banging their heads on overhanging rock, and he’s sitting pretty. If that’s not a tactical advantage . . .

Ahead of them, there’s the crackling sound of a lightsaber coming to life, and a reddish glow fills the tunnel. Ian stops short and holds out a warning hand to them.

“Don’t,” he says.

“But it could be—” Amy starts, trying to push past him.

“No,” Ian says. “It’s not her.”

“How do you know?” Amy demands. Her voice is soft, but she sounds insistent. “She’s my sister, and I—”

“Unless your sister built herself a lightsaber in the last two days,” Mickey says, “that ain’t her.”

Ian’s eyes are closed, and it looks like his breath is coming fast.

“Ian?” Mickey says uneasily. He reaches out with one hand, starts to put it on Ian’s shoulder, but Ian jerks away.

“Something’s wrong,” he says.

“No kidding,” Mickey says. “What should we—”

“No,” Ian says, and now his eyes are open, staring down the tunnel toward the red glow. “There’s something wrong with him. I don’t . . . I . . .”

“Ian,” Mickey hisses, “snap out of it. I don’t know how to fight whoever the fuck this is. You do. So pull it together, all right?”

“What do you mean, you don’t know how to fight them?” Amy says, panicked. “You have a blaster. Blast them.”

“Lightsaber can deflect it,” Mickey says. “Send it back at you, even. Their reflexes . . . it’s not human.” He glances at Ian awkwardly, but Ian’s focus is entirely on the tunnel ahead.

“What’s our play?” Mickey says. “Do we run? Do we—”

Ian’s face is blank. He doesn’t look at either of them, but starts walking slowly toward the red glow, his lightsaber held at his side.

Mickey swears and unholsters his blaster, staying half a step behind Ian.

“You got that stunner with you?” he says to Amy.

“No! It’s back on the ship,” she says. The panic is rising in her voice. “What should I do?”

“Nothing,” he says. “Just . . . just stay behind me. And if you have to, run back to the ship, get yourself back home. Don’t worry about us, all right? We’ll be fine.” Fucking typical. He gets hired to find someone’s daughter, and here he is, getting their other kid killed instead.

How did this job get fucked up so fast?

The tunnel ends abruptly, widening out into a cave so dark, Mickey can’t see how big it is. All his eyes can pick up is the figure standing in the middle, surrounded by the red glow of a lightsaber. Unlike the warm steady glow of Ian’s, this one spits and flickers, hurts his eyes to look at. He squints, but all he can see is a slight shape in dark clothes, short hair cropped close to the skull. Then the figure raises the lightsaber, in what’s either a challenge or a salute, and Mickey sees it’s a boy. Young, only a few years older than Amy. His skin and his eyes are both dark, and his face is set in an angry glare.

Ahead of him, Ian makes a small punched-out sound, like he’s been hit. But he swings his lightsaber up in front of him, mirroring the boy, and keeps walking steadily toward him.

“Ian,” Mickey says, urgently. “Who—”

Before he can finish, the boy is rushing at them, bringing his blade down in a furious, two-handed stroke that would have cut Ian in half, if he hadn’t swung his own blade up faster than Mickey’s eye can track. The two beams meet with a harsh crackle of energy, and then Ian is ducking under and away, drawing the boy away from Amy and Mickey as he twists around to follow. With a clear shot at the boy, Mickey raises his blaster and takes aim, but his arm is wrenched away by an invisible grip, and he loses his grip. The blaster skids across the stone floor of the cave, and he drops down to his knees after it, only to find the grip is now around his throat, and he can’t breathe. His mind goes blank as he tries desperately to claw the grip around his throat away. But there’s nothing there.

The grip releases him, and he squints blearily up at the blur of lights in front of him. Ian is on the offensive now, distracting the boy from his attempt to kill Mickey. He feels Amy crouched next to him and realizes she has his blaster in her shaking hands.

“Don’t,” he manages to croak out, but she’s ignoring him, looking down at the trigger and trying to fit her hand around the grip.

With an effort—his arms feel like they’re magnetically attracted to the ground—he reaches up and pulls her hand and the weapon back down. “Leave it,” he says, and she’s staring at him, her eyes wide and scared in the flickering light. She tears her gaze away to look at Ian.

The two fighters are locked together now, Ian pressing down, the boy not giving an inch. Sweat is standing out on both their faces. The boy’s lips are pulled back with disgust, and Ian doesn’t look as calm as Mickey had expected. Instead his eyes are wide—he has almost the same look on his face as Amy.

“Don’t,” Ian says, barely audible over the crackle and hiss of their blades. “Please, don’t.”

Mickey had thought the boy was at the edge of his strength, but he’d been holding back just enough: he shoves up against Ian’s lightsaber, swinging his blade out and over as he spins away, so that Ian falls forward onto his knees and lands with the red lightsaber just above the exposed back of his neck.

Mickey grips Amy’s wrist. “Look away,” he says, and with every last bit of strength he has, tries to raise the blaster, even knowing that it’s already too late.

The boy brings the lightsaber down a fraction of an inch, and Ian screams. The smell of burning flesh fills the cave.

And then the boy steps back, lowering his blade and, with a hiss, deactivating it. He’s just a shadow against the glow of Ian’s lightsaber, fallen on the ground. He stands for a moment, looking at them. Then he turns and runs toward the tunnel at the far side of the cave, disappearing into the darkness.

Ian tries to stand, but only makes it a few steps before his legs give out and he’s back on the ground. Mickey grits his teeth and pushes himself to his feet, staggering a few steps forward and stopping to catch his breath, then taking off again.

“Get to Ian!” he shouts over his shoulder at Amy.

The blaster is too heavy in his hand, and slippery with his sweat, but he settles it close to his body and keeps moving. It’s dark, but some of the crystals in the tunnel wall are giving off their own pale green and blue light, and he can hear the boy’s pounding footsteps up ahead.

Mickey follows him up the tunnel, through twists and turns, but the boy is faster, and uninjured, and the sound of him running gets fainter and fainter. Mickey’s lungs are burning, and his legs feel heavier with every step.

After a few more minutes, he staggers to a halt, breathing hard. Between each gasp, there’s no sound. No more crystal glows. Just the soft, smothering darkness pressing in around him.

Somewhere off to his left, he hears something skitter and scrape across the stones. Something big, getting closer. He squints—pointless in the dark—and then squeezes off a random blast in the direction of the sound and holds his breath.

The bolt hits and illuminates the man-high creature running toward him on long-jointed legs, something sticky glistening at the end of the stinger extending from its face. The thing recoils when the blast lands, with a high-pitched shriek like nothing he’s ever heard, then lunges for him again, enraged.

Mickey fires again and again, lighting it up with blast after blast of energy, until the shrieking dies away in a long, low bubbling sound, the half-disintegrated and smoking corpse still twitching spasmodically.

He spits, and swings the blaster up onto his shoulder, prodding the remains with his boot to make sure it’s not going to get back up and follow him with a grudge. “Kinrath, huh?” he mutters.

He’s lost the boy, and in the middle of blasting the shit out of this thing, he’s gotten turned around. Now there are three options, and he doesn’t know which is which: the way he came, the way the boy went, and whatever side passage the kinrath crawled out of.

Mickey grimaces. Nothing for it. He’s just going to have to take a guess.

He takes off down the tunnel farthest from him, as fast as he can. The harsh sound of his breathing seems to echo off the walls and then die in the darkness. His mind is focused on putting one foot in front of the other, but the image of the lightsaber coming down on Ian’s neck seems to be imprinted on his retinas. It plays over and over again, in a flashing loop. The smell of burned flesh is still in his nose, and he swallows, trying not to gag.

He left them alone, Amy terrified and unarmed, Ian injured at least, maybe worse. And now the person who attacked them is gone, probably already out of the tunnel and slipped away into the woods. Or maybe the boy knows his way around this place, and now he’s circling back around to finish Amy and Ian off.

Whichever way Mickey ended up choosing, he feels suddenly sure it was the wrong one.

But there’s a dim bluish light growing ahead of him. Not the kinraths. And not Amy and Ian. Another path back to the outside, the moonlight giving enough light for him to actually see where he’s going again.

The tunnel slopes up, and Mickey skids on loose pebbles, struggling to get traction. Finally he gets his feet under him again, and runs the last few meters out of the tunnel, bursting into the open.

Movement ahead of him, over by the treeline, back toward the woods where they left their ship. The boy is there, on an idling speeder, looking over his shoulder. The second he meets Mickey’s eyes, he turns around, and the speeder takes off. Mickey drops to one knee, braces his shaking arm, and takes aim, sighting the speeder’s engine, but it disappears into the trees in a few seconds. Even the thrum of the engine fades away before he can get a shot off.

He lowers his blaster to the ground and breathes out through his teeth, hard. His eyes are blurring. “Fuck,” he says. _“Fuck.”_

 

By the time he’s made his stumbling way back to Ian and Amy, Mickey’s gone over what just happened enough times that he’s sure of it.

“He waited for me,” he says. Ian is sitting up, pale and sickly-looking in the dim light of the crystals, but not as bad as Mickey had thought he might be. His lightsaber hilt is back on his belt, and Amy has a shoulder under his arm, holding him up.

“What?” she says to Mickey. “What do you mean?”

“I lost him, he got ahead of me in the dark,” Mickey says. “By the time I made it outside, he should have been long gone. But he waited. Made sure I saw him, saw which way he went.”

“Why?” she demands. “That doesn’t make any sense. He was trying to kill us, why would he want us to know—”

“No,” Ian says, the pain clear in his voice. “He wasn’t trying to kill us. If he wanted us dead, we would be. He was trying to get our attention. My attention,” he corrects himself. He grips Amy’s arm and tries to stand, but only makes it about halfway. Mickey goes around to the other side and helps lever him to an upright position. Ian leans heavily on him, almost deadweight. The metallic burned-meat smell from the wound across the back of his neck hits Mickey again, but he swallows back his bile and bears Ian up to his feet.

“You knew him, then,” Mickey says.

“Maybe,” Ian says. “It’s hard for me to say for sure.” But he doesn’t sound unsure. “When we get back to the ship, I’ll be able to find out. There’s someone I can ask.”

“What about Gemma?” Amy demands. “She’s the reason we’re here, not whoever this crazy person is. He’s gone, forget about him! We need to keep looking for _her_.”

“Oh, so you think it’s a coincidence this other fucking clown with a lightsaber shows up in the middle of the job?” Mickey demands. “In the middle of nowhere, in a place only your sister has any reason to be?”

“There’s no time for this,” Amy says. “Every minute, every second we don’t find her, she’s in more danger.”

“Danger that she put herself in, if you’re right about why she ran,” Mickey fires back. “I was hired to find a girl who was kidnapped, not a girl who ran away to learn magic from some power-crazed maniac.”

“It’s not her fault!” Amy yells. “She was . . . tricked. Seduced. She never—”

“We need to go back to the ship,” Ian says quietly. “I’m sorry, Amy, but following him is the only lead we have now.”

“Thanks to you,” Amy spits, turning back to Mickey. “You couldn’t even outrun a teenager, couldn’t stop him from almost killing Ian. Where’s all your _training_ now?”

Mickey doesn’t say anything. Maybe because he thinks she’s right.

“Amy, don’t,” Ian says. “It’s not his—”

“Shut the fuck up, both of you,” Mickey says harshly. And for once, they do.

 

When they make it back to the ship, Amy retreats to her bunk, and Ian doesn’t blame her. He was running off a hunch when he brought them to this planet, true, but how had he gotten it so wrong?

Looking for Amy’s sister—V’s daughter—and finding his own brother instead, that is a whole other level of fuck-up.

It doesn’t matter that Ian hasn’t seen Liam since he was a toddler, still crying and being carried in Fiona’s arms. From the second Ian saw his eyes, he’d known it was him. But _why_? And how? How did his baby brother leave his family, get trained—by who?—and come to be on Dantooine when Ian was there searching for someone else entirely?

Why does Liam want to kill him—and why did he stop?

Ian hasn’t seen or talked to his family since he was taken. Fifteen years. The Jedi don’t allow their students contact with anyone from their old lives while they are being trained. It would divide their hearts and minds, part of them forever longing for the lives and people they’ve lost. One of the first and most important lessons they learned was to possess nothing, to wish for nothing, to be content only within themselves. The possessiveness of love and longing, it belonged to the dark side. To own something, to love something, was to fear losing it. Fear led to the dark side.

When they came for Ian, he left with only the clothes he was wearing—one of Lip’s shirts, and pants that Fiona had made just for him, the first clothing that had ever been his, only his. ( _Possessive_ , something in him whispers. It had been rooted in him from the very beginning. But they had had so little. How could he have been expected not to cling to what he was allowed?)

He carries a part of them with him now, a scrap of cloth torn from that shirt, childishly carried and concealed year after year, until he built his own lightsaber and wrapped the fabric around the hilt. It’s a secret that even his master never knew, a guilt buried so deeply that his own waking mind has almost forgotten it.

It hadn’t mattered. It hadn’t stopped him from becoming a Jedi. His master had agreed before he left on this mission—he’s ready for this.

And it’s part of his mission now to contact Lip. Not because he wants to see him, or to see Fiona and Debbie and Carl. But because he has to. To find Gemma. To do his job.

“Found it,” Mickey says, coming into the galley holding a slim medkit. He’s still walking slowly after the fight in the tunnels, and there’s a ring of deep red around his neck, standing out against his too-pale skin. “It’s kinda scanty. I usually have a better one, but—”

“Yes, your ship is back at the junkyard, I know, it’s all my fault,” Ian says testily, and grabs for the kit. Mickey cocks an eyebrow at him and holds it out of his reach. Ian sighs, and leans back in the chair. It’s the pain making him irritable, he knows. But Mickey seems to be enjoying having the upper hand, and that doesn’t help, either.

“You couldn’t reach back there if you tried, I don’t care what kind of freak flexibility you have,” Mickey says. He pulls up a chair to sit behind Ian, and opens the kit on the galley table. “Put your head down. If you can.”

The skin of the burn protests being stretched and exposed to more air than necessary, but Ian breathes and breathes and lets the pain ebb and flow, passing through him but not touching him. Mickey spreads the numbing cream against Ian’s skin with bare fingers—Ian winces at the thought of the germs he’s introducing to the wound—and then presses a bacta patch over the burn.

“You didn’t have to numb it,” Ian says. “We don’t have to feel pain, if we choose not to.”

“Oh yeah?” Mickey says. “That must be real nice for you. Any reason you don’t share that trick with the rest of us?”

Ian narrows his eyes. “It’s not a trick,” he says. “It’s the Force.”

“Fine,” Mickey says. “Sorry I thought my skills might be called for, what with the burn oozing blood on the back of your neck and whatever. My mistake.” He snaps the medkit shut. “Gonna make your call now, figure out where we should go next?”

“Yes,” Ian says. “But—”

“But what?”

“I need you to . . . not be there. When I do it.”

“Why?” Mickey demands. “We’re doing this job together. There’s no reason for you to have intel that I don’t. Not unless you’re hiding something from me, trying to screw me over somehow.”

“No,” Ian says, trying hard to keep his voice even. “It’s not about that. Nothing to do with the job.”

“Then why are you making the call?” Mickey says, suspicion plain in his voice.

Ian sighs, and rests his head in his hands. It’s easier, less tiring for him to not have to focus on managing the pain from the burn. But he can’t admit that to Mickey, not now.

“It’s personal,” he says. “I think the person who attacked us is someone I knew before I entered the Order.”

“That makes no sense,” Mickey says. “He was a kid. If you’re gonna make up a story, at least make sure it makes some kind of sense first. Otherwise, you know, I might have to get offended, seeing as how you apparently have such a low estimation of my math skills.”

“My little brother,” Ian says. “I think that was him. But it’s been so long. Longer than a decade. I need to call my family and find out where he is now. If he’s with them, or not.”

Mickey’s unimpressed. “Little brother? Yeah, I don’t know if you got a good look at the kid, but that story’s not gonna fly, either.”

Ian can’t help but smile a little, even though Mickey is being an asshole. “Not all families are the same,” he says simply, and leaves it at that.

Mickey blinks, startled. Then he gives a half smile, and Ian feels something kick strangely in his chest. “Can’t argue with that, I guess,” Mickey says. “Fine. You don’t want me here while you talk to your family, I’ll deal. But you better record it or take fucking notes or something, because whatever they tell you, it could be mission-critical, and I’m not letting your feelings screw up this job.” _Any more than they already have_ is implied, Ian thinks, but it’s possible he’s projecting.

“All right,” Ian says. “You can stay.” He has no pride to lose from Mickey hearing . . . whatever he hears. Who knows, maybe Lip will even be happy to see him.

 [](http://loftec.tumblr.com/post/146227288585/the-cold-hard-weight-of-a-blaster-against-the)

 

“Who?” the blue hologram of the man says. It’s not Lip (unless Lip decided to trade his human features for scales, slit eyes, and a forked tongue since the last time Ian saw him). But this is the contact V gave him for Lip, along with a warning not to mention her name, though she wouldn’t tell him why.

“Ian. Lip’s—Phillip’s—younger brother.”

“Yes,” the scaled man says smoothly. “Well. That . . . person is not listed as an accepted associate of the counselor, so unless you have an additional piece of identifying information . . .” He trails off, but doesn’t sound hopeful on Ian’s behalf.

“Hey,” Mickey says, leaning in toward the pocket-size holoprojector, so it picks up his face in addition to Ian’s. “You tell the counselor, if he wants to keep his seat, he’s gonna want to hear what we have to say.” He shifts a little, just enough to make sure the grip of his blaster shows.

The man gives him a small tight-lipped smile. “Sir, you will not be surprised to learn that in the counselor’s position, most requests for an audience are assumed to have a threat of physical violence attached. To make it explicit could be deemed . . . gauche. And it certainly does nothing to increase the credibility of your position.”

Mickey raises his eyebrows. “The fuck kind of place are you from, anyway?” he mutters to Ian, who just sighs.

“Fine,” Ian says. “Tell Lip . . . tell him that I’m worried about Liam, that I—I couldn’t come home sooner because it wasn’t permitted, not because I didn’t—” He stops, shaking his head. “Never mind. Just the part about Liam. That should be enough.”

“Very well,” the scaled man says. “I shall make a note of your request. You may expect an answer within the next—” Static cuts across the hologram, and a shorter man with a glower on his face replaces the figure of the secretary. His hair is slicked back and his clothes are severe, formal robes with a collar that almost hides his weak chin.

It could be Lip. If Ian could only get a better look at his eyes . . .

“It wasn’t _permitted_ ,” the man says, and the words are thick with mockery.

That’s Lip. Older, more bitter. But definitely Lip.

“Fifteen years on Coruscant, playing with toys, while we begged and stole and fucking starved. But you weren’t _permitted_. To see us, to talk to us, to send us one _fucking_ credit.” He laughs. “Oh, but here you are now, ready for your family to welcome you back with open arms. Worried about your brother. Now that it’s _permitted_.”

Ian looks steadily at the figure in front of him. It is, all things considered, what he should have expected. It shouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt. That scrap of fabric, part of his lightsaber, under his hand whenever he fights, at his side wherever he goes, it’s meaningless. It always has been. The possessive love of family is an illusion. A dangerous one.

He knows this. And yet.

“Lip,” he hears himself say, and it’s like someone else is speaking through him. The ten-year-old he was, almost too old for the Jedi to take, but too young to say no, to run once they took him. _One less mouth,_ he remembers Fiona thinking to herself, ashamed but longing. “I’m . . . sorry.”

“Oh,” Lip says again. “Well. If you’re sorry.”

They are silent for a few seconds, and Ian hears Mickey shifting uncomfortably behind him. He’d almost forgotten he was there.

Amy was right. This was a bad idea. He’s become distracted, disturbed by his fear and confusion about his own family. Forgetting why they’re here.

“I’m not contacting you for myself,” Ian says finally. He sits up straighter, pulls the neutrality of his title, his role between himself and his brother. “I’m searching for a missing girl, and I think may be able help.”

“Why would I help you with _anything_ ,” Lip says.

“Because whatever I did wrong, however I failed you, this girl has nothing to do with it. She deserves to be found, brought back to her family.”

“Family,” Lip sneers. “Because that’s a thing you care about.”

“No,” Ian says. “You’re right. I don’t. I can’t. And that isn’t what this is about. I’m sorry if it hurts you to hear it, but it’s the truth.”

Lip stares at him for a moment, and then looks away, shaking his head. “Un-fucking-believable,” he says. “You, sitting here, giving me that look, like I just told you it was time to go to bed. Same stupid fucking kid.” He looks up toward the ceiling. “What do you want, Ian.”

“I need to know where Liam is,” Ian says. “The girl, we think we tracked her here, to Dantooine. But when we went looking, someone else was waiting for us. I think—I think it was him.” _There are no coincidences,_ he can hear his master saying, her voice low and steady _. Only the paths the Force chooses._ “Do you know, Lip? Where he is?”

Lip meets his eyes this time. “She left, you know,” he says, and Ian’s stomach twists.

“Who?” he asks.

“Losing you, she thought it was her fault,” Lip presses on. “She tried to hide it, but I knew. She was never going to forgive herself for letting them take you away. And you know what she did? She took Liam, and she left. The way _they_ did. The way _you_ did. And you know what happened after that? I stayed. I kept going. I got us _out_. Without any of you. Without V, or Kev, or the fucking Jedi Council. Without _Fiona_.”

Lip stops, breathing hard. But Ian is silent. So he keeps going.

“So, no, Ian,” Lip says. “I don’t know. Where Liam is. Where Fiona is. Where your random missing girl is. And I don’t give a shit. Don’t try this again. All right?”

Ian nods once, slowly. He can’t tear his eyes away from the hologram, from Lip. Remembering an arm across his shoulder, pulling him close . . . but maybe it was something he imagined for himself once, as a kid, making up stories about his big brother who knew the answer to everything.

Before Ian can think of anything to say, the hologram crackles and flickers out, and Lip is gone.

Neither of them say anything for a minute. Then Ian turns and looks back at Mickey. “Well?” he says. “Did you hear anything mission-critical?”

His voice is smooth, polite. But Mickey’s not fooled, and he’s not going to curl up into a little ball of guilt just because Ian’s brother is kind of an asshole.

“Maybe,” he shoots back at Ian. “Didn’t have an alibi for your kid brother, from what I heard.”

“No,” Ian says thoughtfully. “He didn’t, did he?”

“And it sounds like your sister bugged out too.” Mickey chews his lip for a second. “This . . . thing. The Force. It run in families?”

Ian looks up at him, startled. “What do you mean?”

“The Jedi trained you, and someone trained Liam, or at least they started. He’s got the lightsaber, built it or whatever you said, and it looked like he knew what he was doing with it.” Mickey jerks his head at Ian, indicating the burn. “Maybe Fiona, she did the same thing. Trained and everything. Maybe she did it first.”

“She never would have left them,” Ian mutters, half to himself.

“She did,” Mickey reminds him. “For whatever reason, she did it. And Lip, he said something else, too. ‘Without V, or Kev.’ He hasn’t talked to them. Probably figures they abandoned him when they made it out, same as you. But Amy, she knew about you. V had told them. You think V would have told them about Fiona leaving, too?”

“You said it was a speeder,” Ian says. “Liam. He didn’t have a shuttle or a jumper. Nothing that could take him off-planet.” He’s staring out the front of the ship, into the darkness.

“Yeah . . .” Mickey says slowly.

“If you had a grudge against the Jedi,” Ian continues, “and you wanted to train on your own, and train someone else, which makes more sense: setting up shop in some random corner of the galaxy and coming all the way back here for crystals every few years? Or finding somewhere close by and having the kid grow up with everything he needs right on his doorstep?”

“They’re here,” Mickey says. “On Dantooine. All three of ’em. Hell, they’re probably a few hours away.”

Ian nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Shit. We gotta go.” Mickey stands up, but Ian reaches out and lays a hand on his arm.

“We’re not going to find anything in the dark,” he says. “And whatever else she’s done, or is planning on doing, I don’t think Fiona’s going to hurt Gemma. Not to mention, we all need to sleep. Especially if Liam’s as happy to see us when we find him as he was today.”

Mickey knocks his hand away, but not with any real force. “Fine,” he says, and turns to leave. “You know where I’ll be.” Then he pauses. “You wanna tell her, or should I?”

“Oh,” Ian says, craning around him to look down the corridor toward the door of Amy’s bunk, which is open more than a crack. “Somehow I think she already knows.” The flicker of shadow just inside the room would have been too subtle for most eyes, but Mickey didn’t have any trouble spotting it.

“Spying’s illegal in some systems, you know,” he says, raising his voice. Silence for a second, and then—

“Pretty hard to prove in all of them, though,” Amy replies, just loud enough that her voice carries, and Mickey can’t fucking help it. He laughs.

 

Mickey doesn’t expect to get any sleep. But he’s wrong. Maybe his system is still working through the last of the crash from the uppers. Maybe it’s the comedown from the fight in the caves. But almost as soon as he closes his eyes, he’s back down there, in the dark. He’s lying on the floor of the tunnel. And he knows, without being able to see it, there’s something behind him. But he’s frozen. His whole body is locked in place, the way Liam had gripped his throat. Paralyzed. And he can hear it coming closer, legs scraping across the floor of the tunnel. He can’t close his eyes, he can’t scream. All he can do is stare ahead as it pauses, drawing itself up above him . . .

“Hey.” A hand on his shoulder. His bare shoulder. The voice is soft, gentle, close to his ear. He’s still lying on his side, but instead of the stone floor of the tunnel, he’s in a bed. A softer bed than he can remember ever lying on. And there’s someone behind him, murmuring quietly. The hand on his shoulder strokes soothingly down his side, and he finds himself relaxing into it, relaxing back against the warm body, pressing against it. The voice hums, almost teasingly, and the body behind him nudges closer. He turns his head, searching for a kiss—

And startles awake for real, panting and staring up at the plain metal ceiling of his bunk.

 

Ian jerks awake, breathing hard. He runs a hand down his face, feeling the sweat gathered there. It had been so real in his mind, he still half expects to feel the weight of Mickey’s body next to him on the bed.

He never should have interfered with Mickey’s mind. Shouldn’t have created this connection between them. No matter how bad Mickey’s nightmares had gotten, no matter how good his intentions had been, Ian should have stayed away.

He hadn’t meant to share that with Mickey. Hadn’t meant to think about it in the first place.

Some Jedi found they could experience physical intimacy without emotional involvement. Ian had learned the hard way that he couldn’t.

Back on Coruscant, under the eyes of the other students and his master, it had been easy to avoid feeling interest. Acting on it had been out of the question.

In the field, on his own, it’s going to be harder to control. He’d known it would be, which was exactly why he shouldn’t have done what he had with Mickey.

But even as he accepts that, acknowledges his failure, his mind is lingering on the sensations: the feeling of Mickey’s body under his hand, the way Mickey pressed back against him, hungry for his touch, his mouth open and searching. Mickey’s low gasp when Ian rolled his hips forward.

He’s still hard, under the thin sheet, and his fingers twitch with the urge to take hold of himself. He forces his hand flat against the bed, closes his eyes, and breathes out through his nose, trying to maintain control.

After a few minutes of breathing slowly and calmly in the dark, he can feel himself relaxing, the warm tension of arousal leaving his body. He tries not to feel disappointed. This is the right thing to do.

But as soon as he starts to drift back to sleep again, the awareness of Mickey returns, as though he’s lying beside Ian, touching himself, his mouth open and hot again Ian’s neck.

Unlike Ian, Mickey doesn’t have a reason to stop. He’s probably not even really awake. And he definitely has no idea that Ian is aware of what he’s doing, what he’s feeling.

Ian can feel himself start to harden again, and groans with frustration, punching his fist into the mattress.

He’d try meditating if he thought it would help, but more awareness of the energy flowing between him and Mickey is the last thing he needs right now. The only thing he can do is wait it out.

Each pull and twist of Mickey’s hand echoes through Ian’s body, teases him harder and harder, until he’s almost gasping with the effort it takes to not roll over and grind down into the bed. He can feel Mickey’s breathing, feel when he swallows, when he licks and bites his lip . . .

Mickey’s mouth . . . Ian gasps at the uninvited image of Mickey’s lips wrapped around him, sliding down so he can pull off just enough to lick at the head, Ian’s cock pushing between his lips, leaving shiny wetness behind . . .

The sound Ian makes this time is more like a whimper.

Mickey suddenly swallows him down again, deep this time, and Ian realizes with a stab of misery and guilty satisfaction that it doesn’t matter what he does or doesn’t do next—it’s too late to stop himself from coming untouched, gasping, one hand gripping the sheets next to him and the other coming up to wrap around the back of Mickey’s neck—except that Mickey’s not there. Just the feeling of him. The smooth heat of his throat, and the slide of his tongue stroking Ian gently through the last shuddering pulses.

“Fuck,” Ian breathes. “S-sorry. I’m sorry.” Mickey can’t hear him. Doesn’t even realize what just happened between them. But he can’t stop himself from saying it. His eyes are wet, and he doesn’t know if it’s from relief or shame or just the overload of sensation.

His muscles are relaxed, and he can feel drowsiness wash over him like a wave. Distantly, he’s aware that Mickey is touching himself again, but he can’t keep his eyes open, even when he feels Mickey’s sharp intake of breath, and knows that he’s coming.

Ian drifts back to sleep, and tries not to let himself think about what he’s done.

 

Mickey wakes early and suddenly, after maybe five hours of sleep. The uppers are out of his system, finally, and his body is aching, but a normal, getting-too-old-for-this-shit ache, not the bone-deep pain of withdrawal. He lies still for a few minutes, remembering his dream from the night before. Not really surprising—he hasn’t been with anyone for months now, and between that and the crash from the pills, he can understand why his body and brain felt the need to take a little tension release into their own hands.

His hands.

Hell, he feels better this morning—after being choked and knocked to the ground by a homicidal, Force-wielding teenager, without having taken a shower for about a week—than he can remember feeling for a long time, and if getting off while he’s half asleep to fantasies about blowing a random stranger is what it takes, then sign him up.

He rolls out of his bunk and stretches, cracking his neck and back with satisfaction, then pulls on the rest of his clothes and armor and heads to the galley.

One of the things they’d bought on Kenis was a crate of temperature-stable ration packs, now all stacked away neatly in the galley. Mickey grabs one and takes it outside to eat in the pre-dawn gray. He leans against the ship’s hull as he unwraps one of the protein squares and takes a sticky bite, watching the mist rising from the trees nearby as the first rays of the pale sun spill over the horizon behind him.

A part of his brain is buzzing along in the background, calculating as he stares at the forest in front of them. They’re going to be traveling on foot—Liam had been on a speeder. How far could he have gone, and how long will it take them to catch up? They’ll have to carry rations and water with them. Will it be enough to get them as far as they need to go?

No way to know. He takes a too-big bite of protein square, and it basically glues his mouth shut.

While he works on unsticking his mouth, he hears someone behind him, standing in the open hatch of the ship, and he turns.

It’s Amy. She’s looking out past him, toward the forest. The longing on her face is painful to see.

“You think she’s here?” she asks him softly.

His instinct is to shrug, to make a joke. But he manages to rein it in.

“Make sense,” he says. “And Ian thinks so.”

“You trust him?” Amy asks. She looks surprised.

This time he does shrug. “He’s done pretty good so far. And this Jedi stuff—it’s what he does. I don’t know shit about it, and I don’t want to. But it’s what he knows. He thinks they’re here, they’re probably here.” He takes another bite, talks around it. “Anyway, it’s the only lead we’ve got.”

She sighs. “Yeah.”

“Bring your stunner this time, all right? They know about the lightsaber and my blaster. But you might be able to take them by surprise, if it comes down to a fight.” He can’t imagine it’s not coming down to a fight.

She swallows, looking nervous. “All right.”

He nods, and she looks more confident. A little, anyway. Good enough.

“Ian awake yet?” he asks.

“Don’t think so. Didn’t see him.”

Huh. Mickey had figured the ability to wake up on command was probably one of his weird-ass monk skills.

“Go get him up,” he tells her. “We gotta get moving.”

When Ian finally comes outside, he looks pale and distracted.

“Hey,” Mickey says, and Ian darts a look up at his face, and then back down. But he doesn’t say anything. The hell?

“You ready for this?” Mickey asks him. “We find them today, you might not like what you have to do about it.”

“I know,” Ian says, and his voice, at least, is calm. “I’m ready.”

Mickey cuts a sideways look at him, standing and looking out at the trees, but like Ian’s looking past them.

“If you say so,” Mickey says. “I’m not sure what kind of backup I’m gonna be here. That kid took me down like he didn’t even have to think hard about it.”

“It’s not your fault,” Ian says immediately, and Mickey snorts.

“Never said it was. Just trying to be realistic about the way this is going to go down.”

Ian turns toward him, and focuses on his face. His arm starts to come up, like he’s going to put his hand on Mickey’s shoulder like he had before, but then he drops it, his hand forming a fist by his side instead.

“I’ll do better, this time,” Ian says, and now he looks awake. “I was . . . taken off-guard, by seeing him. I’m prepared now. You don’t need to be afraid of him. Either of them.”

“Never said I was scared,” Mickey says. “Not scared to die.” He wouldn’t be much of a bounty hunter if he placed a high value on his health and well-being.

Ian nods. “That’s a better way to live,” he says. “We come from the Force, and we return to it in the end. There’s nothing to fear.” He notices the look on Mickey’s face. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to preach.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” Mickey says. “Hell, maybe some religion would do me good, huh?”

“It’s not medicine, Mickey,” Ian says. He’s smiling. “You don’t swallow it down because it’s good for you.”

Mickey snorts to himself at the image that brings up, the fantasy from last night still fresh in his mind, and Ian, weirdly, blushes.

How good are Jedi at reading minds, exactly?

Fuck it, who gives a shit. What does it matter if Ian knows the way he likes it. He’s got nothing to hide, not anymore. He wads up the wrapper of the protein square, and chucks it into the grass in front of them.

_Now_ Ian looks scandalized.

“Keep your pants on, princess,” Mickey says. “We’ve got bigger problems today. You ready to go get what we came for?”

Ian’s hands and body are as clean as he could make them with the help of the faucet and a washcloth, but he can somehow still feel it on him, against his skin. It’s hard to look at Mickey now, knowing the feeling of his arousal, the warmth of his body hidden under the black exoskeleton of his armor. The heat of his mouth, the touch of his tongue.

And once he starts looking at Mickey, it’s even harder to look away.

_Distraction_ , he can hear his master say. _Obsession. Passion. They bring you closer to the dark side. The temptation is strong. But you’re stronger._

He will be. He is. He is a Jedi, and his mission is to bring Gemma home safely. Whatever mistakes he’s made with Mickey, he can’t let them continue to cloud his mind.

But the truth is, what he feels for Mickey isn’t the only thing distracting him.

Liam and Fiona. They were his family, once. He remembers loving them. But they are not his mission. They’re no more or less important, no more or less a part of the world around him, than any other beings.

And whatever they feel toward him—hate or judgment or disgust, like Lip—their feelings are their own. He has no control over them. Only over himself.

“Yes,” he says to Mickey at last. “I’m ready.”

 

The sun is up, and the day is getting hotter. The knee-high yellow grass around them smells sweet, and insects are chirping and buzzing, but none of them seem interested in biting. Could be worse.

Mickey wipes his face with the back of his hand. “Should have brought more water,” he mutters. They’re walking along the line of the trees, in the direction that Liam took the speeder, figuring that he couldn’t have gone much farther into the woods. Mickey has a small pair of macrobinoculars, and every mile or so, he stops for a minute and searches around them for signs of people or buildings, while Ian sits cross-legged and meditates. He claims he should be able to sense Liam when they get close enough, but Mickey will believe that when he sees it.

Amy paces, or rests, or doles out food from the bag full of ration packs she’s carrying. Mickey’s already more tired of the sticky protein blocks than he would have believed, but at least it keeps them all up and running.

He glares at Ian’s back ahead of him as they walk. The Jedi seems untouched by the temperature or the sun, moving lightly through the grass. No fucking sweat on _his_ face. At least Amy has the decency to look as hot and cranky as Mickey feels. On the other hand, she’s taken off her jacket and is just wearing the sleeveless strapped shirt she had on underneath, while he’s stuck in a black shirt, black pants, black combat boots, and black body armor, while carrying a military-grade blaster, which ain’t exactly light.

None of this is actually going to kill him. Probably. It just feels that way for now.

He unslings his canteen and takes a gulp of water, careful not to spill any. They’ve got a couple of water purification tabs in each ration pack, but every planet has its own special molecular creepy-crawlies—ones the tabs might not be able to knock out—and he’d like to avoid the gamble, if they can.

“Take a break?” Ian calls back to him. Mickey grumbles under his breath, but it’s been a mile or two since he looked around, so he plants himself with his arm braced against one of the trees, and slowly scans the horizon out across the grasslands to their left.

“Mickey.” It’s Amy, and her voice is soft, only a little louder than the buzzing of the bugs.

“Yeah, I’m looking,” he says. “Give me a second.”

“No,” she says, “look. In the trees.” When he turns to see where she’s pointing, he sees her hand is shaking.

He raises the macrobinoculars and focuses in toward the trees—there. A girl, standing between two silver-barked saplings, looking in their direction.

“Mickey?” Amy says again, her voice shaky with hope. “Is it—”

“Can’t tell,” he says, tense. “Maybe. Can’t see her face from here, but she’s got pretty dark skin. Short hair, too, like in the picture.”

“What do we do?” Amy demands, her voice rising. “Do we wait? Do we go after her? She saw us, right? There’s no way she didn’t see us.”

“She saw us,” Ian says quietly. The girl in the trees has started walking slowly and steadily toward them.

Amy reaches out and grabs Ian’s arm, sucking in a breath. “I can’t tell if it’s her,” she says. “Mickey, let me see.”

He hands over the macrobinoculars, and she presses them to her eyes, focuses them . . . and then drops them and takes off running toward the girl, pushing bushes and branches out of her way, stumbling on rocks and roots.

Mickey swears and goes after her, trying to catch up. He can see she’s not thinking about anything except getting to her sister as fast as possible—forget about the fact that her sister might try to attack her when she does.

Ian’s running next to him, and Mickey’s relieved to see his lightsaber hilt in his hand.

“Fuck, she’s fast,” Mickey pants out.

But Gemma doesn’t speed up, even with her sister stumbling and falling trying to get to her. Mickey is close enough now that he can see her face, and it’s not angry or excited or guilty or anything else he would have guessed. It’s perfectly serene.

“Gemma,” Amy calls out, her voice cracking. _“Gemma!”_ And then she runs the last few meters through the trees and throws herself toward her sister in a hug that’s more like a tackle. Ian runs forward, within arm’s reach, ready to pull Amy back. Mickey’s still catching up, but he keeps his eyes on Gemma’s hands as he runs, in case she has a weapon hidden.

Bracing herself by taking a step back, Gemma supports her sister’s weight, wrapping her arms around her as Amy buries her face in her shoulder and takes huge, shuddering breaths.

“Why did you _go_?” Amy is sobbing now, her voice muffled. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have come with you, why didn’t you say any—”

Her sister reaches up and puts her hand gently on Amy’s neck, squeezing fondly. “Shh,” she says, trying to soothe her. “Amy, don’t. Don’t worry. It’s all right. It’s all right now.”

Mickey and Ian stand awkwardly a few feet away, hands still close to their weapons, but starting to relax as the seconds tick by without anyone making a wrong move.

Slowly, Amy starts to calm down, and she lets go of Gemma, pulling back to look at her with watery eyes. “Why?” she says again, and now she sounds hurt. “I don’t understand—”

“I know,” Gemma says, still smiling, still calm, like seeing her sister in hysterics over finding her again is just another nice thing to happen in her nice day. “But I’ll show you.”

Mickey glances at Ian, and they share a look—concern, confusion. Doubt. Mickey had pictured the ways he thought this meeting was most likely to go, but this definitely wasn’t one of them.

Gemma brushes a few stray tears off Amy’s face, and then hugs her close again for a second. Looking over Amy’s shoulder, she finally seems to notice Ian and Mickey.

“See you brought some company,” she says, still all smiles even though Ian and Mickey are both staring at her blank-faced. “Who’re your friends, Amy?”

“V and Dad sent them,” Amy offers eagerly, and Gemma looks impressed.

“Is that so?” she says.

“Yeah,” Amy replies. “Mickey’s a bounty hunter, and Ian—this is _Fiona’s Ian_ , Gemma! The Jedi! Can you believe it?”

“She’ll be glad to see you,” Gemma says casually, and Mickey can feel Ian tense up.

“Is she—here?” Ian asks, looking around like he thinks she’s gonna do a tactical roll out of the bushes.

“Of course,” Gemma says with a little laugh. “Why else do you think _you’re_ here?”

Mickey feels a chill shoot down his spine.

Ian’s face goes blank. “What?” he says.

Gemma smiles again, and reaches her hand out to her sister. “Come on,” she says. “Let me show you.”

 

They head farther into the woods, following Amy and Gemma, who are walking hand in hand, their heads bent together as they talk quietly. Everything is going a lot smoother than Mickey would have expected, and he finds getting more and more tense as a result. His blaster is in his hands, which should make him feel better, but even that isn’t enough to tamp down the growing anxiety.

“She seem . . . off to you?” he mutters to Ian.

Ian’s eyes are fixed on the girls. Mickey can’t read his expression. “Maybe. We have no basis for comparison.”

“Sure,” Mickey says. “But it seems like she should be a little, I dunno, happier? Or pissed that Amy followed her when she ran? Not just so . . . calm. Shit, she’s acting more like a Jedi than you do.”

“Thanks,” Ian says wryly.

“Not a bad thing,” Mickey says. “But I’m just saying. It’s weird. You don’t think so?”

“I think people can react to things in all kinds of ways,” Ian says.

“Yeah?” Mickey says. “Well, that’s real understanding of you. But do me a favor and don’t relax too much. I got a bad feeling about this.”

 

The house, hidden among the trees, is small and wooden, made of expertly smoothed gray boards, with a flat tiled roof and blue-tinted glass windows. Not the rustic hut Ian had been expecting.

As they walk toward it, he looks more closely at Gemma, notices that her clothes (a long gray shirt over gray leggings) are simple compared to the dress and jewelry she’d been wearing in the picture, but they're clean and unwrinkled. Her hair is shorter, with nothing slicking it back. She looks healthy, happy, and clean—cleaner than Mickey, Ian, or Amy.

Maybe whatever is happening with Fiona isn’t as bad as he feared.

But then he remembers the rage in Liam’s eyes. And his silence. Was it that he didn’t want to speak? Or that he couldn’t?

Ian feels something inside his stomach twist, and he grips his lightsaber hilt harder. If Liam is waiting for them inside, he might try to run at them, gain the element of surprise. Out of the corner of his eye, Ian can see Mickey getting more and more tense the closer to the house they get. His blaster is steady in his hands.

“Amy,” Ian calls out to her. She turns, a flash of annoyance on her face for being interrupted during the reunion with her sister.

“What?” she calls back.

“We—don’t know if it’s safe,” he says. “You should let us go in first. Or we’ll have them come out. Slowly.”

Amy rolls her eyes at him, and looks to Gemma for her thoughts. Gemma just shrugs, smiling, and before Ian can manage to say anything else, the door is opening, and someone is there, and it’s Fiona.

It’s Fiona.

 

At first, seeing the woman standing in the doorway—young, smiling, unarmed, holding her hands out in welcome—Mickey almost laughs. This is who they’ve been worried about?

Then he feels Ian go still beside him, and when he turns to look at him, he knows something is wrong. Ian’s mouth is open, and he looks like a child. A scared, lonely child.

“Fiona?” he whispers, so young.

She nods and smiles, tears in her eyes. “I’m here,” she says. “Ian. Come here.”

He walks the last steps toward her, dropping his lightsaber as he goes, and then kneels down and buries his face against her, his head bowed. She kneels down with him on the ground and wraps her arms around him, rocking them gently back and forth. “Ian,” she’s whispering. “Ian, sweetie. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Ian takes a breath—a horrible, rasping sob—and Mickey shifts from foot to foot, uncomfortable. Slowly he leans down and picks up Ian’s forgotten lightsaber, and hooks it onto his own belt. Doesn’t seem right to let it just lie there on the grass.

Fiona is murmuring soft, soothing words to Ian, and Mickey can’t hear them and he doesn’t want to. He looks away.

Liam comes out of the house behind her, and his eyes are fixed on Mickey. In the daylight, it’s obvious how young he is. The hollowness of his cheeks and the inch or so of wrist showing at the end of his black long sleeves make it clear he’s just finished a growth spurt.

Mickey curses. “Just a kid,” he mutters. “Just a fucking kid.”

But the look on Liam’s face doesn’t change. He stares Mickey down with the same flat, angry, distrustful look, ignoring Amy and Gemma off to the side, and Fiona and Ian in front of him.

After a few more seconds, Fiona stands, and helps Ian to his feet, leading him into the house. Amy and Gemma follow, and Mickey starts after them, but Liam finally moves, blocking him from the door. He’s a few inches taller than Mickey, and that dead-eyed look is fucking creepy, but Mickey meets him glare for glare.

“Liam, it’s all right,” Fiona calls back to him, and after a second, Liam moves back just enough to let Mickey walk by him. Liam’s eyes follow him the whole time.

The inside of the house is dim and cool, with the only light coming in from the blue-tinted windows toward the back. Fiona leads them to a low square table, with mats around it. Her and Ian sit down cross-legged, facing each other, and Amy and Gemma do the same on the other two sides.

Mickey and Liam stay standing.

“Thank you,” Fiona says as soon as they’re settled.

“For what?” Ian asks, confused. Still with that raw, broken-open look on his face. Mickey swallows.

“For bringing Amy here. For come here to see me. To see us. It means so much, to see you now, to know that—”

“That’s not why we’re here,” Mickey cuts in, and it’s like when something comes loose in an engine and brings the whole machine to a screeching halt. Everyone in the room is staring at him, but he sets his jaw and keeps going.

“I’m here because someone paid me a lot of money to bring her”—he jerks his chin at Gemma, hyperaware of the way it exposes the bruises around his throat—“back home.”

“I am home,” Gemma says to him, still with that terrible calmness. “And now Amy is, too. And Ian.”

“The fuck are you talking about?” Mickey says. “You have a family. It’s not her.” He turns to Ian. “Fucking say something. You don’t even know her. You haven’t seen her since you were a kid.”

Ian stares up at him, and he opens his mouth, about to say something, but Fiona raises her hand.

“Who are you?” she asks, and even though there’s nothing different about her face, or even her expression, he senses something rising in her. A power that will break him and not even notice. His fingers tighten on his blaster, and behind Fiona, he can see Liam shift.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “Told you what I’m here for. So, you are going to let her go? Or do we have to take her back ourselves?”

For a long moment, Fiona holds him under her gaze, and he waits, heart beating hard. Then, without warning, she relaxes and sits back with a smile.

“There’s blood on you,” she says. Like she’s pointing out a piece of food in his teeth.

“What,” he says.

“The people you’ve killed,” she says. “The ones who died screaming. You think you can make up for it, but it doesn’t work that way. Their blood is on you.”

He’s silent for a moment.

“Yeah,” he finally says. “I know.” But he doesn’t move. Her face gets a little harder. Then she turns back to Ian, like nothing happened.

“Ian,” she says, her voice warm, open. She reaches out and takes his hands, and he doesn’t pull away or resist. Just stares at her face. “I know what they told you. What they made you think. That we didn’t matter. That your family wasn’t your family. But they lied to you. Do you understand? That’s why they took you away so young. Because you were more vulnerable to them. But when I—” She stops, looks down for a second, then seems to gather herself. “When I let them take you away, that’s when I realized. They have something, a power. And we have that power too. _I_ have it. But they knew I would never listen to them, that I’d use it to protect my family, not fight their battles for them. That’s why—”

“You left him,” Ian says slowly. “You left Lip and the kids.”

“I know how it looks,” she says earnestly. “I know, it doesn’t look good. But somehow, inside me, I knew—Liam, he’s strong. Strong enough that they would have come back for him, too. I had to keep him safe, I had to learn enough to train him myself. To make myself strong and take care of him.” She pauses, gives a proud little smile. “And I did, Ian. All on my own. Don’t you see? He’s free, from the Jedi, from everyone. No one will ever be able to hurt him, to make him do something he doesn’t want to.”

“Yeah,” Mickey says. “Except you.”

Liam lifts his hand and moves his fingers a little, and suddenly Mickey is gasping for air. Again.

“Don’t worry about him,” Fiona says soothingly. “Let him go. He can’t do anything. Not here.” Liam tightens his hold just for a second, and then drops his hand, still glaring. Mickey gasps and feels the blood rushing back to his head. His vision wavers.

“Might be sorry you did that,” he croaks, but Liam doesn’t react. Neither do Ian or Amy, who are staring at Fiona, waiting for her to keep speaking, like Mickey doesn’t even exist.

“I need you and Amy here,” Fiona says to Ian. “With your family. Don’t you want that? Want to get back what they took from you?”

“It’s not safe,” Ian says slowly. “I—my master—she says—”

Mickey’s not trained in the Force, but even he can feel the surge that goes through the room when Ian says that. Fiona’s eyes are bright, pinning him in place. “Ian,” she says. “She lied to you. She wanted you to be weak. Together, we’re stronger. All of us. As a family.”

_You’re part of this family_ , Mickey hears. _And you’ll act that way._ He shivers once, hard. Not anymore. Never again.

He kneels down at Ian’s side, puts a hand on his shoulder. “Ian,” he says urgently. “Don’t listen to her. She’s full of shit, she just wants to control you. Don’t give into this, all right? You’re stronger than this. You’re a Jedi.”

His body slams to the floor, every limb and his throat pinned.

“Don’t you touch him,” Fiona hisses, her eyes boring into him as her invisible grip tightens. “He was mine before they took him. Mine to protect. Not yours.” She narrows her eyes. “No matter what you’ve shared, he is not yours.”

Ian is staring down at him distractedly, like he’s trying hard to remember something. “Don’t,” he murmurs. But he doesn’t move.

“Stop!” Amy says suddenly, her eyes suddenly clear, like she’d just woken up. “Fiona, stop, you’re hurting him!”

“He doesn’t matter,” Fiona grits out. She’s standing now, looking down at him, her hand stretched out. “He isn’t family.”

“He helped us find you,” Amy argues. “Let him go!” She turns to Ian. “Ian, don’t just sit there! Do something! Stop her!”

Gemma stands up, and Amy’s eyes go vague and distant again. Everything is going distant. The stabbing pain in his chest makes him twitch, his legs kicking weakly. Weak. So fucking weak.

He closes his eyes. Stars, all around him, filling the sky. He’s seen it before. A feeling of peace spreads through him, and he relaxes. Lets the darkness fill him up. It’s not so bad like he thought at first. It’s quiet. No screaming. Just stars.

 

At first, Ian feels nothing, seeing Mickey writhing on the floor. It’s interesting, in a scientific way, to see the body’s reaction to being deprived of oxygen. But it doesn’t seem to mean anything. Mickey’s eyes flutter shut, and his movements get slower and slower. The buzzing of the insects outside seems to get louder.

Then there are stars in front of him, coming and going in flashes like fireworks. He shuts his eyes, trying to clear them or see them more clearly, and instead he sees Mickey looking back at him, his eyes wide but steady. He looks . . . happy, almost. Ian didn’t realize how miserable Mickey looked the rest of the time they’ve been together, until he saw Mickey look like this.

Mickey looks at him, stars all around him, and Ian stares back, transfixed.

“Ready,” Mickey says softly.

“What?” Ian murmurs back, his mouth barely moving. Mickey’s eyes are so blue, and he can’t look away from them. Mickey leans closer and closer, their mouths almost touching.

“Don’t listen to her,” Mickey says. “She doesn’t control you. None of them do. All right? You got that?”

“Yeah,” Ian says.

Mickey kisses him hard, and bites his lip until it stings.

“Then wake the _fuck_ up, asshole,” Mickey says.

Ian slams back into his body like he’s breaking through the surface of water. Everything seems to rush around him dizzily. He gasps for breath, and his eyes land on Mickey’s limp form, with Amy, Gemma, and Liam all staring down at it with empty eyes. Fiona’s face is transformed with rage, her hand still stretched out toward him.

“NO!” Ian doesn’t have his lightsaber, he doesn’t reach for the Force. He jumps to his feet and shoves her, making her stumble back and breaking her concentration. Fiona turns on him, her teeth bared, and shoves him back against the wall.

“Don’t challenge me, Ian,” she says. “Not now. I’m your sister, and I know what’s best.”

His eyes go to Mickey’s body, to his lightsaber on Mickey’s belt. Then he closes his eyes and sees the stars again. Loses himself for a second in that perfect sense of peace: the conviction that everything is together, connected, and none of it matters—and all of it matters. And Mickey is there with him, standing at his side, just out of sight.

When he opens his eyes, his lightsaber is in his hand, ignited, and Fiona is standing in front of him, her eyes pleading. “Ian,” she says. “I love you. Please.”

“You don’t,” he says. “You don’t even know me. You love the power that you get from love.” He jerks his chin at Amy and Gemma, at Liam. “You aren’t taking care of them. You aren’t training them. You’re using them. Are you going to let them go?”

“Why don’t you ask me what I want?” Gemma says. “I came here. I want to be here. Fiona asked me to come.”

“Why did she do that?” Ian says. “You’re not family, and that’s all she cares about. She needed you to get to me. You’re not her family, Gemma. You’re bait, and now that she has me . . . why would she need you?”

He doesn’t think about it, just blurts it out blindly, desperate to keep them talking, give himself time to think about how to get out of this, but as soon as the words leave his mouth, Gemma recoils like he slapped her.

“ . . . Fiona?” she says after a second, her voice very small.

But Fiona just smiles, her eyes on Ian. “My brother,” she says, pride in her voice. “Once you’re free . . . you’ll see. This is all worth it. Anything for my family. Anything.”

Liam moves suddenly, throwing her his lightsaber, and she grabs it midair, the red blade flashing out and toward Gemma. Amy screams and tackles her sister to the ground, and Ian is between them and Fiona, blocking the killing stroke before it can land.

“It’s too late, Fiona,” he grits out, pushing back against her strength and her rage. “Whatever you could have been, whatever you meant do—it’s too late. You’ve seen what it did to him. It consumed him. You didn’t protect him. You destroyed him.”

She gasps, trying to break out of the block. “He is _safe_ ,” she says. “I saved him. Me. And I’ll save you too, if you just let me in. Ian! Let me help you!”

The temptation is still there, beneath the surface. To give himself over to someone else. To put the responsibility in their hands and let himself be . . . what? A tool? A weapon in the hands of someone stronger than himself? To never have to decide for himself what the right course of action is . . .

“You see?” she whispers, and he knows that she’s seen into his mind. “It’s the same. They control you. And why? Because you let them. But to them, you’re just a servant. You’re mine. My little brother. I _love_ you.” The tears in her eyes catch the light, turning red and orange and red again. “Let me take care of you.”

He opens his mouth—and sees Mickey on the floor behind her, climbing to hands and knees, slowly and painfully. He looks up, meets Ian’s eyes . . . then raises his blaster with one shaking hand, and fires.

The shot hits Fiona in the back of her right knee, and she goes down with a shriek of pain. Ian reaches out with the Force and tears the lightsaber out of her hand, sending it to the other side of the room, then he pushes at her mind, where the pain and fear are already rising up, until she passes out.

With a wordless yell, Liam lunges at him, but Ian is prepared, and grabs him, holding him down with his weight and the Force until Mickey pulls a pair of restraints from his belt and secures his arms behind his back.

Ian puts his hands on either side of Liam’s head and, as gently as he can, sends him into unconsciousness.

Mickey falls back to the ground, gasping with pain and struggling to catch his breath.

“Fuck this,” he says. “Fuck this fucking job. And _fuck_ your family.”

“You’re alive,” Ian says dumbly, staring at him.

“No shit, bantha-brain,” Mickey snaps. “We gotta get these two on the ship before they wake up, and I can’t fucking walk.”

“But—you gave up,” Ian says. “You said you were ready. You—” He cuts himself off before he can finish describing what Mickey did.

“Yeah, well,” Mickey mutters, not meeting his eye, and grimacing with pain or embarrassment or both. “Changed my mind.” Ian keeps staring, and Mickey finally looks up. “What?” he demands.

“I—nothing,” Ian says.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He starts to stand again, waving Ian away angrily when he tries to help.

Ian takes a step back and finally manages to tear his eyes away from him. Next to them, Amy is helping Gemma to her feet. They both look glassy-eyed, but Gemma has a look of bleak despair.

His first instinct is to say something comforting, to try to tell her it’s not her fault.

It’s not what she’s ready to hear.

“Will you come with us?” he asks her instead.

She swallows and leans harder on her sister, staring at the ground.

“Gemma?” he says. She looks up at him, and then nods.

“Yes,” she whispers.

“All right,” he says. “That’s . . . that’s good. Amy, can you help her?” Amy stands up straighter, her arm locked around her sister’s waist.

“We’ll manage,” she says.

 

The walk back to the ship goes on for hours, through the hottest part of the afternoon, and even though they had drunk their fill of water and filled Mickey’s canteen at the house in the woods, they run out hours before the trek is over.

It’s a good thing Mickey had refused Ian’s offer of support, since carrying Liam and Fiona unconscious with the help of the Force is more than enough for him to handle. But it slows them down, and by the time they finally emerge from the trees by the ship, the sun is setting, and they’re all sick and dizzy with exhaustion, dehydration, and in Mickey’s case, injuries.

Ian lets Amy and Gemma look after each other, just reminds them to pace their water intake and eat rations as they go, so they don’t throw it all up. Then he focuses on getting Liam and Fiona secured in separate bunks.

By the time he goes to check on Mickey, Ian’s had too much time to think about it. He’s already started the conversation a hundred ways in his mind, and gotten nowhere, because he has no idea what Mickey is going to say.

He’s actually pretty sure that Mickey is going to refuse to talk about it at all. But that’s not going to stop Ian from trying.

He leans against the closed metal door of Mickey’s bunk, and reaches out just enough to sense that Mickey is awake. Awake and in pain. He raps on the metal doorframe, to be polite, and then waits. When Mickey doesn’t respond, he sighs.

“It’s hard to hide from a Jedi,” he says. “But if you need, I’ll go away.”

Mickey is silent for another second, and then: “Pretty sure the not-answering thing made my position clear.”

Good enough. Ian tries the handle and it’s not locked, so he lets himself in.

Mickey is stretched out on the bed, staring at the ceiling. It is, Ian realizes as he stands in the doorway, the first time he’s seen Mickey without his armor. He’s still dressed in black—pants and a long-sleeve shirt—but he looks so vulnerable without it, Ian almost wants to look away. But he doesn’t.

Mickey meets him stare for stare. The redness on his neck is fading away, and yesterday’s bruises are showing through, with new, larger ones already starting to bloom. It looks like Liam got in a hit on his face while Mickey was trying to cuff him, too. He has the beginnings of a black eye.

“There’s nyex in the medkit, do you want me to get you some?” Ian asks.

“Not real excited about drugging myself to sleep right now,” Mickey says. His voice sounds worse than before. “Feeling kind of jumpy with those two on board.”

“Fair enough,” Ian says. “Maybe there’s some perigen patches, though, for your neck at least . . .”

“Already looked,” Mickey says dismissively. “Forget it. I’ve had worse. Bounty hunter, remember?”

“Fine, if you’re sure,” Ian says, reluctant to push. “Can I sit?”

“Can I stop you?” Mickey asks.

“Of course,” Ian says. “I told you. Say the word, and I’ll go.”

Mickey rolls his eyes. “All right, all right, settle down. Just giving you a hard time. Sit, for fuck’s sake.” He gestures grandly at the foot of the bed, and then winces at the movement.

“Sorry,” Ian says, helplessly. “I didn’t mean to—”

Mickey squints at him with his good eye. “You come in here to say something, or just to be a pain in my ass?”

Ian huffs out a laugh, and finally relaxes. He looks at Mickey, and Mickey looks steadily back at him. Ian recognizes that look for what it is. Vulnerable, the same way seeing him out of armor is.

And suddenly, Ian doesn’t have anything to say. He doesn’t need to. He reaches out and takes Mickey’s hand, and runs his thumb as gently as he can across Mickey’s bruised knuckles.

Mickey’s hand shifts in his, and for a second, Ian thinks that he’s pulling away, and his stomach sinks. But instead Mickey slides his hand up, thumb stroking across Ian’s palm, and then grips Ian’s hand, their fingers locked together.

Heart pounding, Ian looks up from their joined hands and meets Mickey’s eyes again. Mickey doesn’t look away.

“Well?” Mickey says after a second, a challenge in his voice. “You have something you want to say?”

“No,” Ian says. “No, I’m good.”

“Damn right,” Mickey says, and squeezes his hand. After a second, he pulls at Ian’s arm.

Ian lets go of his hand for long enough to take off his heavy robe, and then lowers himself slowly and carefully onto the bunk, trying not to jostle Mickey too much. He doesn’t know how close is too close—doesn’t know how close he wants to allow himself to get right now—so he leaves a few inches between them, but picks up Mickey’s hand again.

After a few seconds, Mickey makes an annoyed noise and pulls him closer, rolling onto his side with a little groan of pain, so Ian is tucked against his back with an arm around his waist. Mickey relaxes against him, and Ian can’t hold back a sigh as he nudges his nose against the back of Mickey’s neck.

“Can I get some sleep now, or what?” Mickey says. His voice sounds as annoyed as ever, but his hand is warm in Ian’s.

“Probably a good idea,” Ian says. He tries to match Mickey, sounding as unaffected as he can.

“You gonna be here?” Mickey asks, and Ian doesn’t have to read his mind to pick up on the uncertainty behind the question.

“Uh-huh,” Ian whispers. His voice is softer now. Meeting Mickey halfway, as best he can.

“Good,” Mickey says. “That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Ian whispers. “Yeah, it’s good.”

Things are going to get complicated when they wake up. What to do with Fiona and Liam. What to do with Gemma, and how much to tell the Council. How to answer V’s questions about why they took her other daughter on a bounty hunt halfway across the galaxy.

But it can wait. For a few more hours, everything can wait.

 

[ ](http://loftec.tumblr.com/post/145900002040/he-breathes-he-breathes-he-breathes-and-reaches)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Besides making INCREDIBLE art for this fic, loftec also contributed several awesome ideas, including: Mickey's blaster being old military stock (it was much less badass originally, and when she had the cooler one in the art, I was like . . . YEP, let's go with that one!), and, most importantly, Ian having Lip's shirt as part of his lightsaber hilt. Thank you for being such an awesome co-creator, dude!! I'm truly honored. :)
> 
> And thank you to you guys for reading. You're the wind beneath my wings and all that good stuff. <3


End file.
